The Silence (1963)

Saw The Silence, a film following a boy and his mother and his aunt as they stop off in a fictional European city while travelling home.  The film is a strange mixture of slowness and intensity.  It opens with the three of them laying half-asleep in a train car, sweat trickling down their brows as they lol in the carriage.  Suddenly the aunt coughs up blood.  This is the film in a nutshell: nothing happens, and then something alarming happens.

The nature of the relationship between the mother and the aunt is left tantalizingly ambiguous.  Although the aunt is sick, she has a domineering, possessive attitude towards the mother.  Is this some latent lesbianism?  Some prudish guard over the mother's affairs?  At one point they seem to be on the verge of kissing, but in another moment the mother accuses the aunt of interrogating her, grilling her for information about a date she went on.  Where does the aunt get her sense of entitlement to the mother?  Is it familial or romantic or (god help us) perhaps both?

To add to the confusion between the aunt and the mother, the aunt is a translator.  At one point the boy's mother says "Isn't it wonderful that we can't understand each other?"  There's a theme of communication vs a sort of ambiguous non-communication.  The supporting cast all speak a made-up nonsense language invented for the film.  There seems to be a tension between a sort of conquering and categorization that the aunt is engaged with vs the mute feminine mystique of the mother.  The mother never explains herself, and we are not usually allowed to see what she's up to.

To add even more to the confusion, most of the film is shot from the boy's perspective.  We see tanks passing by the train windows in the opening scenes, but they are clearly toy tanks.  We follow the bored child as he runs around the hallways of the hotel they're staying in.  We watch him laboriously draw a picture.  Is any of this in his head?  Is this young boy fantasizing about his mother and aunt?  It is confusing.

Mostly however it is slow.  There are shots of boobies and a few sex scenes which raised eyebrows in the 60s but which is nothing too shocking by today's standards (still though, it might be awkward to watch with your parents) however, like Last Year In Marienbad, most of the film feels slow and boring and stuffy.  I watched it right after lunch and perhaps fell into a food coma, but really.  The film is 90 minutes long but it feels much longer.  Maybe my attention span is just shot?