Silentium, directed by Nidhal Chatta and based on a screenplay by Sophia Haoues, is nothing less than a gem, a harsh and necessary gem. A jewel for its screenplay, which leaves no respite for the shadows.
A jewel for its direction, with the mastery and exacting standards of a great work.
The slowness of the camera’s movements, which allows us to enter into the interiority of each of the players in the drama, and which takes the time, in a world of breakneck speed, to follow each asperity, each paradox.
The choice of framing, which exacerbates the pathos of the individual stories and, in particular, makes the house a real character in the film.
The composition of the images: the opening shot of the water under a pontoon is particularly striking in its metaphorical, almost psychoanalytical power, conveying both the violence of the rape and the violence of the girl’s emotions, in an “underbelly” that takes us back to the movement of repression, but also, perhaps, to the secret, intimate call for redemption, a kind of fantasy of returning to a certain purity, through water, or to a kind of embryonic state in the womb of the mother – of the sea?
The colors and photography in general, which turn each shot into a masterful tableau, bringing to this depiction of unrepresentable horror both the necessary realism and the poetic transfiguration that is the meaning and quality of all true works of art. Colors whose warmth reminds us of Tunisian landscapes, which in turn become another actor in the drama – giving this story the thickness of great tragedies.
The almost living presence of the sets, at once realistic in their contemporary references and metaphorical in their traces of wear and tear, of unhealed past wounds that spare none of the film’s characters. The trace of time passing. The visible traces of damaged walls beckon towards the invisible of our own inner abysses. Of our own abysses. And our own sulphurs. Of our own violence.
The construction of the characters is also important: each one is shown enclosed in his or her own distress, in his or her own powerlessness; each character carries a wound and a secret journey, an inner drama, a loneliness. And that’s not the least of the film’s intelligence
Last but not least, we must mention the place given to silence, to the silence that says so much, to the silence that navigates within each of us, in societies that “silence” us, that ‘mutilate’ us, the place given to silence that allows us to truly “enter” the film, and to meet ourselves there, to meet our own silence.
Nidhal Chatta and Sophia Haoues have created a film that will go down in history: the gentleness of the camera, its profound delicacy on a subject of such violence, combined with the absence of any compromise, any reduction, the refusal of any negotiation with what can be called “evil”. Silentium is not “a film about rape”. Silentium is not a “militant” film that “deals with contemporary issues”. Silentium is a profoundly poetic work of art, rooted in our contemporary world but sublime in its horror, which would otherwise be voyeuristic and violently brutal.
Silence, that “silentium” which beckons both to the masculine (not reducible to men) and to an antique that tells us not only the memory of Tunisia but that of an entire Mediterranean West, at the same time as reminding us of a common heritage, this silence, married to the young woman’s voice-over, reveals holes of all kinds. We might ask ourselves whether, at the end of the day (at the end of the tale), it is not the violation, the defilement, the murder of our solitudes, our memories and, precisely, our silences, our intimacies, as well as their precious necessity, that this film tells us, with such grace, intelligence and elegance.
Silentium is a film that saves us.
From isolation, stupidity and censorship – that of mechanical states, religions and societies.
In the midst of chaos, heartbreak and despair, at the heart of these irreducible solitudes, there are the words of a screenwriter and the gaze of a director who make no compromise with beauty. With art. With what “howls without sound”, to quote Duras.
And they remind us, for the duration of a film, that the function of poetry, of art, is precisely to transcend the misery of our lives, in a common humanity that could, in the manner of Camus, bear the name of fraternity.
Text: Julie Grimoud (Author, director, actress and Co-Founder Espace M’Fuma, asbl )
Photos: Ahmed OUERTANI
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