Another Silence (Santiago Amigorena, 2011): Canada, France

Reviewed by Matilda Frid. Viewed at Santa Barbara Film Festival.

Another Silence is a non-typical revenge drama directed by Santiago Amigorena and takes place in the very diverse setting of Canada and South America.

When the movie starts we get to see a grey and snowy Toronto. For the first minutes we are introduced to the female cop Marie and her family. She has a husband and a son who are leaving the dinner Marie made for them to go and see a game. At first she is reluctant but then she lets them go. Her husband and her son is driving to the game when suddenly, a car stops and kill them with a machine gun. Marie breaks down an locks herself in their house for some time. After a while, she decides she wants to seek revenge on whoever killed her family. She finds out that the one who shot her husband and son is the young Pablito, who is related to a guy she framed a few years earlier. Entirely on her own, she heads down south to find him and kill him. She follows him all the way to the Argentinian border with only one thing in her mind.

At first, I was not convinced. I very rarely like movies with almost no dialogue and few interesting events, and this was no exception. The movie is so incredibly slow that it was hard to pay attention. It wasn’t until the very end when we finally saw something happen, both inside of her and around her. Before that we just get to see a woman travel. She encounters few people on the way and the only story is that she seeks a place to spend the night. I really enjoyed the very last scene that everything built up to. But you can’t make a whole movie on one scene.

This movie is very undramatic, despite the dramatic story. I’m pretty sure that’s the way the director wanted it, but I feel that he fails to make the movie interesting because of that. When you strip a movie of all the drama, you have to have something else that makes the audience feel something. An interesting and original story or maybe convincing characters. The only thing I liked about this movie was the contrast between the two settings. It was a very beautiful environment and I enjoyed the way they captured it with the camera. I also felt that the actor who played Marie, Marie-Josée Croze, did a good job considering she had to carry this entire movie on her shoulders. Although there were only a few moments when we saw real emotion in her, those scenes worked.

I didn’t feel like “Another Silence” was worth my time since it was not my type of movie at all. It didn’t make a lasting impression which is crucial. I don’t think I would ever watch it again.