Film

User reviews of this film

• Technoguy said...

  Posted on Mar 10 2008 00:19 The Silence is the last film in the 1st trilogy.After the austerity of the 2 previous films
  Bergman lets rip with a cinematic sensuality of Felliniesque proportions. We are in a godless world where people don’t communicate and a strange language is spoken. Two sisters,Anna and Ester,have an incestuous relationship.Anna is sensuality
  incarnate,Ester is spiritual and possessive and is a translator. She is also very ill.
  On a train ride back to Sweden they stop in a strange town, Timoka, due to Ester’s need to rest somewhere.In a seedy opulent hotel they rent two rooms and a bathroom.
  The film is done like a chamber piece,Bach playing in the background. The heart of the movie resides in Johan,the young son of Anna.He is a revelation. The atmosphere is like a cross between The Fallen Idol and The Shining. Johan wanders the vast corridors interacting with waiters,dwarfs,furniture,staircases and shadows. He is often left by his mother to wander.He seems the only,truly curious,exploratory and communicative intelligence and offers a kind of hope,connecting with everybody.
  Ester dreads not getting home and dying alone.She drinks alcohol and smokes
  cigarettes,often lying in bed or up typing when not spying on her sister. Anna often
  abandons her son and Ester to go out and picks up a bar man in town to escape from her clinging lesbian sister.She teases her with graphic details of her love making. They often argue with each other. Anna smoulders throughout like Anna Mangani.
  The lighting is impressive with a clever use of darkness and light.There are many close-ups and full head shots.This world has no transcendence only a clashing of egos.People make their own heaven and hell.The language cannot be understood.
  There are moments of tenderness between the child and the individual sisters, between the child and the hotel workers and guests, and between the elderly waiter and Ester.Johan and Ester grow closer in the absence of his mother. Johan has a scene with a troupe of dwarfs in which they dress him like a girl. He also puts on a display of his puppets for Ester where they speak a funny language when they get frightened. Ester asks Anna not to go back out but she does taking the stranger back to a room in the hotel to make love in.While this is all going on Johan spies a tank going through the streets from the hotel window at night.Planes are also heard to fly overhead.The people look robotic and a horse’s ribs are showing as it drags a cart.
  Ester is too ill to travel home and asks her sister to leave with Johan without her.Anna
  cannot understand why her sister is not dead,what has she to live for?However on the train home with his mother Johan pulls out a letter from his auntie where she has translated a few chosen words of the unknown language.Ester lives on through the child.In the absence of God we have each other. The film must have been ahead of its time in it’s full and frank physicality.

  Report as inappropriate