The Silence (1963)

While browsing my favorite website: listsofbests, I came across a list were I had seen all but one of the 170 or so films. This was the single film I needed to watch to finish the list.

Part 3 of Ingmar Bergman trilogy, where the other two films are not on any of my lists, I decided to read the full plot summary of the other two and just watch this one. I'm glad I did because I learned that the three are all but completely unrelated. The only connection between the films is how Bergman shot them. They are all told in 3 (what he considers) distinct parts, all corresponding to the background music.

You can imagine how exciting a foreign film called "The Silence" can be. It is slow, there is very little dialogue, and the plot is ambiguous at best. We don't even learn the relationship between the two leading women until about 40 minutes in. We don't know there names for almost the entire film.

I guess you could say it was well shot, and trying to figure out what the heck was going on was my focus throughout the film. Kind of like solving a puzzle, I wanted to figure it out myself instead of running to the computer and reading the plot. What you wanted to know didn't stop you from enjoying what was going on, so it wasn't frustrating. That was about all this film had going for it however.

Not Bergman's best work, and painfully slow at times, not going to watch this one again.

Vote: 4/10

IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057611/

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