‘A Silence’: San Sebastian Review

Dir. Joachim Lafosse. Belgium/France/Luxembourg. 2023. 100 mins. 

The essentials of what makes a Joachim Lafosse film are all present in the latest drama from the Belgian director – and that includes characteristically imposing performances, this time from Emmanuelle Devos and Daniel Auteuil. Yet A Silence fails to match Lafosse’s best work, focusing as it does on some very contemporary issues of abuse and authority but without opening up the topic beyond the realm of the expected.

It feels as if a subtly expert director has been outflanked by the demands of a reality-based drama 

Admirers of a distinctive, often under-rated voice in European cinema will be intrigued to see Lafosse’s latest variation on themes of domestic tension and territorial dispute. But even the solid commercial presence of Devos and the nowadays too rarely seen Auteuil is unlikely to give A Silence serious resonance following its San Sebastian competition premiere. Like Our Children (2012) and After Love (2016) – arguably Lafosse’s best to date – A Silence focuses on domestic interiors and the family as a site of intense psychological warfare. The drama is inspired by the so-called Hissel Affair, concerning a lawyer acting for parents of children killed by the paedophile Marc Dutroux. The story’s origins in this cause célèbre may make A Silence more urgent, and more readable, for followers of modern European crime stories, especially in Belgium. Otherwise, the film’s roundabout approach to its theme makes this a narratively somewhat murky affair.

The film begins with a middle-aged woman, Astrid Schaar, seen in close-up in her car’s rear-view mirror, as she drives to an urgent rendezvous – the finely-tuned shifts on Emmanuelle Devos’s face setting us up for psychological tremors ahead. Her appointment is with police inspector Valérie Colin (an imposingly no-frills performance from Jeanne Clerhal). She gives Astrid bad news about her teenage son Raphaël (newcomer Mattheu Galoux), who has hit a cataclysmic boiling point after the slow-building process revealed in the extended flashback that follows.

Astrid is married to François (Auteuil), a successful, much-respected lawyer who is currently acting for the Guérins, a couple whose children have been killed by a paedophile. The Schaar house, situated in an elegant leafy estate, is under siege from TV and newspaper reporters avidly following the case, but the press pack respects the boundaries of the main gate, patiently waiting for François’s occasional sorties to address them. All seems safe and controlled within the Schaars’ privileged enclosure, but the family’s respectable surface is scarred by a long-festering secret.

The nature of that secret will not come as a surprise to anyone familiar with the Hissel story, and in any case, Lafosse reveals it some 45 minutes in. We begin to piece things together when Astrid hears from her daughter Caroline (Louise Chevillotte) that another family member is on the warpath – and it emerges that the silence of the title is one that Astrid has been keeping for some 30 years in the name of… her marriage? A quiet life? Social respectability? Lafosse lets us make up our own minds about her complicity in a horrifying state of affairs.

As for François, here the film is guilty of a certain heavy-handedness. Somewhat sketchily characterised, he occasionally steps into the foreground to deliver stern broadsides to the press, sometimes puffing balefully on a cigar. But for much of the time, François – whose full-time involvement in the Guérin case means that he is always seen formally dressed – is seen hovering grimly around his darkened home, opening his laptop in the small hours in a way that gives rather too obvious signals of what is at issue.

All of this might not matter if the film had been more direct from the start in its uncovering of moral corruption and hypocrisy. But A Silence starts by awkwardly dancing around its central theme, slowly spiralling in on it. This makes the suspense of its opening section more confusing than anything else, with the Schaars’ house both surrounded by the press and targeted by marauders whose identity is perfectly evident despite the moody atmospherics that surround their night moves.

As the specifics of the drama come into focus, attention increasingly turns to adopted teenager Raphaël. But while first-timer Galoux capably piques our interest as a laid-back, taciturn embodiment of sheltered privilege, he’s not quite up to portraying the boy’s later descent into traumatised, booze-fuelled meltdown, playing drunk in any case being a notorious challenge to even the most experienced actors.

At moments, Lafosse’s expertise is amply apparent – for example, the long take at the house, as Raphaël’s dark night of the soul comes to a head. The director’s consistent fascination with the home as both castle and prison is powerfully expressed throughout, not least in ostensibly inconsequential scenes like a marital breakfast framed by DoP Jean-François Hensgens in a distancing manner that makes the morning repasts of Citizen Kane look like a model of conjugal intimacy. Hensgens also uses the geography of the Schaar house to striking effect in the night scenes.

Narratively, however, there’s a feeling of confusion. The script is credited to the director and Thomas van Zuylen, who has worked on three previous Lafosse films, with five other writers listed as collaborators; without jumping to too-many-cooks conclusions, one imagines that the discussions about what to reveal and withhold, and when, have resulted in a certain indecisiveness. 

An oppressively ominous soundtrack, dominated by dark, spare strings, is contributed by musicians including Ólafur Arnalds, also heard in Lafosse’s last film The Restless. This matches the careworn tone of Auteuil’s imposing but rather elusive characterisation, and it is left to the always compelling Devos to tease out the emotional and ethical nuances of the film’s most ambivalent character. Lafosse followers may approvingly note the director’s fidelity to his recurring themes and devices, but here it feels as if a subtly expert director has been outflanked by the demands of a reality-based drama which is at once highly complex and yet too brutally simple in its grim import.