There’s something deeply unsettling about the new film from Belgian director Joachim Lafosse. Beyond the fact that it explores issues of child abuse and paedophila, framed as oversized skeletons in the closet of a well-to-do French family, the decision has been made to focus on the guilt of the one ostensibly innocent party in the mix: the matriarch, Astrid, played with customary detail and quiet intensity by the great Emanuelle Devos.
Lafosse’s recent run of films have all been real-life stranger-than-fiction stories of the type you might see in the tabloids that line the supermarket walls. A Silence is more of the same, a classily told but trashily-toned tale of imposing celebrity lawyer François Schaar (Daniel Auteuil) who, while puffing out his chest as the face of a scandalous, national-interest child abuse case, is also nursing his own private predilections for illegal pornography.
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Astrid, the understandably emotionally distant spouse, leaves her husband to tend to his sick wears, focusing her doting attention on bringing up their perpetually-misbehaving son Raphaël (Mattheu Galoux). When Raphaël does something bad, such as playing truant from school, she uses “papa” as a tool for manipulation, knowing that his very presence should strike fear into her son’s heart, as it does her. Auteuil’s scowling, mysterious performance paints his character as a garden variety monster for whom we are made to feel little empathy despite his constant, false assurances that he has learned from his mistakes.
What makes Astrid’s wicket even more sticky is the fact that she’s also covering up the fact that François spent over a year sexually abusing her younger brother, Pierre, and she has been conditioned by her husband into believing the situation is over and has been dealt with. Not, it transpires, for the victim, whose scars still throb 30 years later and now feels empowered to take his brother-in-law to court. Poor timing as François’ own blockbuster abuse case is about to reach its apex.
The film is based on the real life “Himmel affair” from the mid-’90s, though Lafosse is less interested in historical fidelity than he is playing on the psychdramatic tensions of this truly transgressive family. It’s sometimes hard to understand why Astrid has spent so long covering up for her husband (the titular “silence”) when her own life seems to involve trying to subsume his many micro-aggressions and gaslighting admissions. And it’s also one of those films which plays out in flashback with its conclusion delivered as a prologue, which in this case only serves to drain the story of drama as we know too much from the off.
While the performances are solid across the board, with Devos bearing the largest emotional load, the bulk of the film is formally underwhelming, as images of the boringly-shot Schaar estate are overlaid with leading, overly-emotive music cues. There’s fun to be had from watching the information drip down, as characters slowly realise (and react to) what the others already know. But for the most part A Silence takes too much lurid pleasure in the telling of this deeply unsettling tale, and it ends up offering a simplistic, highly moralistic and dramatically wish-fulfilling assessment of its complex subjects.
