‘A Silence’: A Dark Film About the Spider’s Web of Pedophilia and Pederasty

There are films that go in headlong, that grab the viewer from the first minute with actions and direct information about the characters and their environment, and in which everything is in the middle of the minute. And there are films that settle down slowly, in which each of the dialogues in the initial stretch seems almost like a hieroglyph, in which until well into the footage the pieces do not fit together. A silence, The eleventh film by the always interesting Belgian director Joachim Lafosse, the vast majority of which have also been released in Spain, belongs to the second group.

This cryptic character is given not so much by the structure as by the construction of the conversations between the characters, which are pruned of the informative nuances that serve the audience to focus on who is who, why they are there and how they are related to each other. In the nineties, the Canadian Atom Egoyan made systematics an art, especially in The sweet future (1997), in which the essential thing was the climate of enormous toxicity and vileness around its creatures —exactly the same as in A silence—, but in which until almost half of the story you didn’t even know what was happening or what the film was really about. In Lafosse’s film, the essential information for the head to finally make the necessary click comes at minute 40. And it is then that everything not only fits, but explodes: each of the previous dialogues, each action, relationship and shadow takes on an extraordinary, clear and perfect light. The spectator is being challenged, but if he is patient, when he also has the incentive of the atmospheric turbidity created by the director, he is more than satisfied.

Perverse without a single explicitness, and without the need to spoil too much, A silence The film tells of the turbulent web that surrounds pedophilia and pederasty, around the family of a lawyer specializing in this type of crime. How far does it go? Who does it drag in? Who is jointly responsible? Inspired by the true case of Belgian lawyer Victor Hissel, who defended the families of two girls raped and murdered by the tragically famous pederast Marc Dutroux, the film is rough and elegant, subtle and dark. Laffose, who always endows his works with a hidden violence and an almost unbearable moral complexity, once again places you in front of the abyss. As in the excellent Private property (2006), Lose your mind (2012), After us (2016) and A restless love (2021).

And in that abyss lives the wife of the big bad wolf, to whose silence the title alludes, because she knows everything. A figure who these days does nothing but remind us of another real case, that of the writer Alice Munro, and whom Lafosse draws with enormous ambiguity in her treatment of her son, which each viewer must elucidate. Because that is also what the film is about: ways of loving in the family environment. And the dance sequence is made, and meticulously, for that: so that some see a mother and a son dancing, and others glimpse something quarrelsome and terrible, and look at that moment with discomfort, a look of astonishment and, at the very least, embarrassment.

Coda: Laffose was recently accused by more than a dozen of his collaborators of creating a “system of control” behind the cameras and creating a “toxic and destabilizing environment” on his sets. The accusations, which were not accompanied by lawsuits, were published last June in an article in the French newspaper Liberation, which added that these behaviors could constitute “moral or sexual harassment.” This fact does not make the film A silence better or worse in itself, but it is included as a complement to this review. As one more example of the unhealthy climate in which the country (and its cinema) seems to have moved for too many years regarding sex, and now turned into almost a reason of State, which is exactly what the film talks about.