Silence

Cecil saw this one solo at the Waterfront Cinema in Greenock

Cecil says: Looking at Martin Scorsese’s filmography, I realise I haven’t been to one of his movies for over 30 years. He’s not a prolific director, but he’s just not my type, usually, so After Hours was the last Scorsese I had seen before Silence.

I have to say Silence is beautifully filmed (in Taiwan, by the way, not Japan, where the story is set) and the storyline reaches epic proportions, with its nod to films like The Mission or The Piano in telling of Europeans heading to far off shores in various spiritual quests.

The film opens in 1633, with young Jesuit zealots wanting to head off from the sanctuary of their friary in Macau to try to find Ferreira, who has gone AWOL over in the Far East, where the Japs are cracking down on Christians.

I suppose we are meant to empathise with the two young protagonists and to share their hopes of saving souls over there and finding their lost brother. But I found it hard to care really what happened to them, and rather hoped that the Japanese would find them out in order to preserve their own local culture. I found myself wondering how the film might have been shot by a Japanese director, looking at how locals felt about these foreign invaders trying to influence their society.

It’s only about an hour into the story when we first hear a little of what the Japanese authorities’ thinking is on the Jesuits. But when Rodrigues finds himself face to face with the Inquisitor, the Japanese head honcho is portrayed more like a sort of mediaeval Joker character out of a Batman film. I guess Scorsese needed to do that for his American audience.

A scene shortly after that, when the Rodrigues is paraded through the town as a prisoner felt like a 21^st century version of a 1950s western, when the Injuns have captured the film’s hero and he is being prepared for the pot or the scalping stake. Made me wonder how American audiences – especially the Trump supporters – would view a scene like this?

Of course, this is Portugal (well Portuguese Macau), not America, but these are Christian heroes trying to spread the Truth to the far east, so surely they are the goodies?

Well, I’m not sure that really was Scorsese’s message.

The character who comes out of Silence the strongest is Ferreira himself – played by Liam Neeson. He is more grounded as the new Buddhist monk he has become; he is a pragmatist, and has bought his survival with a virtually normal life in compensation for sacrificing his ‘faith’.

I had to wonder also if someone forced on Scorsese the very last scene of what lay in Rodrigues’ hand as his body was laid to rest. No spoiler here, either, but it felt trite to me, and not very believable.

I’m not really sure why the film is called Silence. It’s true, there are many scenes with no soundtrack and the protagonists need to stay silent in order not to be found, though the opening and closing scenes sound as if they have a background noise of cicadas or frogs chirping in the undergrowth. And it reminded me that the only place on earth I ever experienced total silence was the North Pole. But that has nothing to do with this film.

It’s a marathon, too, by the way. Be prepared for 2h40m of your life to be spent watching this one.

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