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The Unspeakable Act
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Enfant terrible
The first thing you notice about Dan Sallitt’s The
Unspeakable Act is how quiet everything is. A house – the home where the
thoughtful teenager Jackie (Tallie Medel) lives with her introspective mother (Aundrea Fares), her no-nonsense sister Jeanne (Kati
Schwartz), and her eager-to-mature brother Matthew (Sky Hirschkorn)
– sets the overall hushed tone, but it spreads everywhere: to streets, parks at
night, even to a high school classroom (maximum unrealism!).
If melodrama, on screen or stage, means literally
‘music drama’, this is drame sans mélo: at
any point of proceedings where we would expect some music to, in the time-honored, conventional way, fill a hole of silence or
underline the mood, Sallitt keeps us suspended in the
stillness and calm of the moment.
Not that all is gentle inside or between these
characters; in fact, far from it – and the music-less atmosphere is a way of
making us, as well as them, a bit uncomfortable, even a little embarrassed, in
the spaces between words.
The film announces its central subject just as quietly,
and matter-of-factly. Jackie, as she tells us in her voice-over narration
during the opening shot, has always felt what we could euphemistically call a
“special bond” between herself and Matthew: that they
are meant for each other, and meant always to be together.
It’s not a case of incest, but rather of something
rarely acknowledged – and almost never treated with any sensitivity or insight
– within cinematic fiction: an intense intimacy, a love between siblings, a
particular sort of folie à deux born
from the closeness – and perhaps also the claustrophobia – of the domestic,
nuclear family unit.
Incest does not and will not happen (and Sallitt does not play on that kind of prurient suspense);
but the possibility of it, the
thought of it, nonetheless comes to reside at the heart of the interpersonal
exchanges and tensions between the characters. It’s not really a matter of “how
far will we go?”; more a matter of “what’s implied
here, between us, and how can we deal with it?”.
Within the film itself, outside of those uncomfortably
confronting or needling conversations which Jackie keeps forcing on Matthew, nobody
who is at all aware of this brother-sister vibe can indeed openly admit or
discuss it in anything other than euphemism, evasion, or uneasy jokes.
As Jackie says: while she can issue the most
outrageous statements about her needs and desires concerning Matthew, everyone
in earshot will bend over backwards to place “the blandest possible
interpretation” on it.
But the fantasy of sibling intimacy – beautifully and
economically conveyed in the moments where this brother and sister share a
bathroom, or curl up on a couch – is slowly coming apart for Jackie, just as it
already has, before the story begins, for Matthew. His path is obvious – leaving
home, attending college, beginning ‘mature’ relationships – and thus left
unstressed by the film; the deliberate note of emotional inexpressivity,
of gormlessness even, in Matthew’s character as incarnated by Hirschkron, deftly displaces his particular self-journey
from the centre of our attention. But how Jackie negotiates her own rite of
passage is the unmistakeable dramatic focus and substance of The Unspeakable Act.
Jackie is not always so assertive or sure of herself
as she sometimes seems, not always the implacable enfant terrible – such as in the scene where she drives Matthew
away by probing what “special sexual perversion” he might have that only she
could selflessly satisfy.
In a contrary incident, Matthew effectively kills the
mood of their pleasant night out when he asks whether having children together
is part of her incest scenario, because he’s not sure what the “limits” of her
imagining are – and this is just a little too much reality for her to bear at
that moment.
With an enviable naturalness and logic, the film
eventually arrives at a psychotherapeutic or psychoanalytic situation, which is
less a grand, cathartic solution than a way of simply, gradually, working
things through, via (as the film name-checks the techniques) transference and
counter-transference: Jackie has sessions with therapist Linda (Caroline Luft).
They discuss many things: family, the attachment to
Matthew, the depression Jackie feels upon his absence; and the eventual loss of
her virginity with another, gormless guy who can’t even say hi to her in public
two days later. Is this, for Jackie, the same road to normalcy that Matthew
seems determined to take? Not at all; the words that resonate, long after the
film is over, are Jackie’s voice-over summation that she is “the exception to
so many rules” – and we believe her, all the way.
Sallitt’s careful scripting and direction give his film a lightly novelistic
aura: sometimes Jackie’s narration reflects on the events we see; at other
moments it wanders off, filling the quiet spaces in the soundtrack with
charmingly digressive reflections. Our sense of closeness to Jackie owes just
as much to Tallie Medel’s sometimes droll, often understated, but always absorbing performance: whether
sneaking a peak during study break at the messages on her telephone, or resting
her forehead in soulful agony against Matthew’s door.
Sallitt is well known as a superb, insightful, encyclopedic film critic; he appears to have helped inspire and encourage a new generation
of American cinephiles who intermix writing, programming
and film/video making. But it would be too easy, in a sense, to account for his
film’s quiet power by duly noting its clear references – to Éric Rohmer, to whom the movie is touchingly dedicated, or to the few other
intense-sibling milestones like Jean Cocteau & Jean-Pierre Melville’s Les enfants terribles (1950) and Benoît Jacquot’s Les enfants du placard (1977) – or by free-associating
across to Mumblecore USA, Lena Dunham’s TV series Girls, and the Australian Sleeping Beauty (2011).
The Unspeakable Act asks not to be
viewed, primarily, through a movie-soaked filter of that kind: the moments when
Jackie plaintively protests that Matthew is starting to cruelly make fun of
her, or declares to him, “what you’re saying is unbearably sad to me” – these
moments are meant to hit us directly, without mediation. And they sure do.
MORE Sallitt: Fourteen © Adrian Martin July 2013 |
