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The Quiet
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There
is a touch of Poison Ivy (1992) in The Quiet – thus of Pier Paolo Pasolini
(Teorema,
1968) and André Téchiné. The cinema of the perverse – via a mystery-thriller
genre framework, especially the intimacy
thriller, frequently a kissing cousin to the art-film. A newly reshuffled
family – teenage deaf-mute Dot (Camilla Belle) must move into the home of her
godparents, where another teen (Elisha Cuthbert as Nina) previously reigned –
provides the melodramatic plot premise.
One
exciting twist here: the moment that Nina discovers that Dot is not really a
deaf-mute at all, only faking it.
(Playing superb classical piano in the music room off the main school corridor,
as Dot seemingly does every third scene, will trip you up that way.) But then,
knowing that, but without saying so,
Nina starts pouring saucy confessions into Dot’s ear – who (not realising she’s
been found out) keeps up the pose of quiet.
It’s
an intriguing moment, because of its dramatic ambiguity: it could be (this is
the most likely hypothesis) that Nina is trying to entangle Dot in an infernal
complicity – and that comes up in the plot, almost half-heartedly, later – but
the perverse part is that Nina seems to be enjoying this confession into the vessel which will not openly respond.
Aside:
why this curious emphasis on confession in dramatic teen films about murder and suicide in high school? – the woeful
Australian movie 2:37 (2006), which
crosses over with The Quiet at
several points, comes to mind, with its awkward device of all the characters
blurting out their souls and secrets to a documentary video camera in another
school side-room. Is it the impact of Big
Brother and its Reality-TV ilk, with their “confession booths” that promise
illusory privacy – and perhaps even phantasmic immunity from guilt?
Immunity
from guilt figures in The Quiet, too.
Overall, the film – with its smooth but unspectacular amalgam of cinema-like
digital shooting/treatments, Austin (Texas) location and local colour, and American Beauty [1999]-type easy
suburban Gothicism – is not terribly interesting. I may be oversensitive to the
developed-at-Sundance tag when it affixes itself to the end of a movie, but in
this case (as in so many others!) it confirmed my worst suspicions throughout.
Like
so many Sundancing films, this one arrives at a weird and neat moral calculus of narrative actions. The
famous, proto-Hitchcockian displacement/transference
of guilt becomes a sly, evasive trick: from Nina who (understandably) wants
to cut the throat of her sexually abusive father (Martin Donovan) to Dot who
actually performs the deed (the typical doppelgänger-who-actualises-your-dreams
device beloved of sleazy thrillers since Strangers on a Train [1951]) to … the
consistently zoned-out zombie mother (blame Mum: this is the rotten American Beauty legacy), played like a
marionette by Edie Falco – she deserves to take the rap for the murder of the demon-husband she turned a blind eye to,
all those nights in their daughter’s bedroom!
This
leaves Dot and Nina to their new-found sisterhood – and this, Babbit
rebaptises, in a final recoding, as an absolute, redeemable good thing. No
matter what their crimes! – no lingering moral ambiguity here. I will venture
something presumptuous here: it seems that almost every female director who
ever directed an episode of The L Word (2004-2009), or worked for the progressive producer Andrea Sperling (on board
here, as on Babbit’s earlier But I’m a
Cheerleader [1999]), will end up making a film like The Quiet: a crypto-queer effort under the guise of some popular
genre, with no specific or overly lesbian content – yet what sense can the
ending here make, with its crazy moral calculus, if it is not secretly
underwritten as a transgressive love story between gals, thus forgiving all
extreme acts that allow freedom from the patriarch, and open-road togetherness?
© Adrian Martin January 2007 |
