Esquisses of excess: The lost art of the unexpressed
The third installment in the Lost Arts series casts a light on secret sentiments… then slips them into shadow.
A bee does the (non-verbal) talking by symbolically scaling a spoon in Part II of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog (1989).
Kindling spirits were the denizens of Polish dwellings who kept Jews in darkness during World War II. Flickering like golden glints of candles in a blackout, their clandestine deeds were the sole source of light for fading silhouettes. Dozens of hundreds were among the selfless who behaved like one director of a Świsłocz orphanage in summer 1941. Before the brusque enforcement of bright yellow Star of David armbands Jews were harder to identify. Tailing Alexander - the illicit guest who had departed her abode - the nameless woman stopped Bronowski in his tracks. He froze. Dawn broke as dashing feet grew louder till the Catholic woman halted, took her crucifix and hung it round his neck.
En route to Białystok Bronowski found himself in tandem with a fourteen-year-old boy who faced the same fatiguing fifty-mile excursion. Four fellow Jews were trailing not so far behind. When rifle-bearing Germans pulled up in a truck they sought to cut their journey short. “Jude?” Terror intensified as young Bronowski stood in silence. The obliging cross replied on his behalf. “Los.” (“Free”), the officer concluded.
Bronowski and the boy advanced as bursts of gunfire besieged their ears.
The band of Jews behind was gone.
Objects speak louder than words. It’s a motif scant in a culture overrun with crude loquaciousness and loose hyperbole; stampedes of drone-like diatribes.
In cinema it’s an endangered species.
Coffee is poured to fill two matching glasses evenly in one of the first scenes of No End, Krzysztof Kieślowski’s 1985 film shot in martial law-ruled Poland. Remembering her husband Antek’s funeral took place yesterday, a frazzled Ulla takes one cup and tips its contents in the sink before returning to son Jacek at the kitchen table. A stocking is a victim of her emptiness scenes later when her fiddling fingers pick a hole: her struggle to admit that she has met with Antek’s ghost.
Prophetic properties can take the form of wordless seers in modern tributes to Greek Tragedy. Dusk is a never-ending state of mind as Meryl Streep’s Clarissa rides a charcoal-colored elevator on the way to see her AIDS-plagued former lover in The Hours (2002). Sofia Coppola’s 2011 Somewhere opens with a car personifying its protagonist’s persisting lack of purpose as a destination-less Ferrari loops a highway.
Elsewhere augury presents itself through the significance of strangers. Espying an old hunching woman hobbling with a bursting bag of shopping, twenty-two-year-old Weronika calls out from her apartment window, “Ma’am – excuse me, can I help?” to no avail in 1990’s Double Life of Véronique. The frail lady is no forecast of her future, as Weronika fallaciously assumes. Instead the heroine is doomed to die weeks later of a heart condition.
Missing our opponent’s chess moves like a tense competitor who checks the clock, we human beings have a tendency to skip the main event: a flaw adopted by our cinematic counterparts. Not having seen the secret object of his ardor in a year, In the Mood for Love’s Chow Mo-wan opens his apartment door in Singapore to find a lipstick-stained, suspicious cigarette butt in his ashtray.
Lips that held it he will never see again.
As Hollywood shunned eloquent soliloquies like James Dean’s 1955 Rebel Without a Cause rant, visceral verisimilitude replaced the classic monologue. Shouldering shame became a semi-silent act. 1980’s Fame sees young musician Bruno’s taxi driver father pile the praise on Irene Cara’s Coco as he drives her home. Exultingly she beams, “We’re gonna be all over the charts one of these days – you mark my words. We’re a hot team, ya know?” The yellow cab arrives before the canopy of a luxurious Upper West Side apartment block. Exiting the vehicle, a grateful Coco waves goodbye and heads for the gold entrance as the doorman eyes her with a dogged doubt. Sure that her classmate and his dad are out of sight, she turns around and heads toward the subway.
Independent movies paved the way for gestures of implicit solace. When Italian brothers Primo and Secondo stake the their savings on a guest-enticing party at their struggling restaurant in 1996’s Big Night, they are shocked to learn their rival set them up to fail. Brawls are traded on the beach in the dark hours of the morning but the kitchen is a quiet haven after daybreak. Sleeping waiter Cristiano lies curled up along a counter as Secondo cracks an egg to cook an omelet. Slowly shares of breakfast are apportioned between him, Cristiano and a somber Primo as the trio tacitly succumbs to the tart aftertaste of fate.
At a time when heated arguments revolve around tech guru Elon Musk’s determination to make mind-reading equipment, few doubt the verbality of feeling. Ornaments of language nonetheless are not the limbs of but accessories to naked souls; trivial trinkets masking vulnerable veneers. In Silkwood it is Karen’s (Meryl Streep) slow cradling of her dumped friend Dolly (Cher) on a swinging bench that showcases their plights. Spying on her colleagues, Karen is endeavoring to prove that the plutonium plant at which she works tweaks radiographies of faulty fuel rods. Dolly’s been deserted by her girlfriend Angela, who has returned to her abandoned husband. Quips about formaldehyde are made - apparently the fleeing lover reeked of it (“She didn’t,” counters Cher; “She did so,” argues Meryl Streep) until the dimming dialogue grows perfunctory; dissolving into Karen’s soothing lullaby.
Long before the subtlety of The Sopranos television seeped into the realm of the unspoken with ER: John Wells’ and Michael Crichton’s fast-paced, hospital-set drama. Despite the series’ elevated stakes no soaring violins were summoned to express excruciating exploits. When resident physician Mark Greene fails to make the crucial diagnosis of a pregnant woman’s preeclampsia in season one’s “Love’s Labor Lost,” he narrowly avoids a stillbirth for the baby boy but loses the exsanguinating mother. Father Sean sits in the nursery and rocks his newborn son as Greene comes to inform him of his wife’s extinction. Like a respectful bystander the camera waits outside, hard-pressed to hear their arduous exchange. Speech doesn’t sound where none is necessary.
Stifled streams of thought made up a whole relationship in David Chase’s The Sopranos. Psychiatrist Dr. Melfi curbs her impulses to scold, shun, taunt or sweet-talk mobster patient Tony. The Mafioso scarcely catches on when she averts her gaze in soreness as he interrupts her pivotal discovery to take a phone call. In response to his bravado-ridden boast of an affair with Gloria Trillo – one of Melfi’s other unhinged patients – she has no choice but to seal her ire: “Why Gloria?” – “Why not?” Tony demands to know. “She’s smart, she’s sexy, she’s Italian.” Melfi is unimpressed. “Italian?” – “You stick to your own kind, ya know.” Bemusement battles her begrudging physiognomy. “What is this – West Side Story?!”
The vexed doctor asks - but goes no further.
Tantalizing are the tethered truths held back from treading into view. Throughout the 1960s Robert Heath, a biological psychiatrist, planted electrodes into patients’ brains to test their different regions of excitability. As Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman reported in a 2020 installment of The Joe Rogan Experience, the highest source for stimulation wasn’t titillation or euphoria but “mild frustration”. Catnip is inedible – and yet our felines chase it like their forebears hunted hares. Kids lay siege to screens to zap the floating figures of a video game. Spoilers for television shows are scoured in the millions to sate restless hunger.
“What happened to the Russian?” Chant Sopranos’ fans. “I don’t know.” David Chase has honestly replied on numerous occasions.
Teasing is the savior of the serial art form at a time when many are convinced attention spans are truncated with every new device. Yet Hollywood insists on smearing screens with the superfluous; doubling details until they’re drooping dollops on an over-buttered bagel. Academy Award-nominated 2020 Netflix film The Trial of the Chicago 7 sees a troupe of anti-Vietnam protesters on trial for incitement to riot. Early on the band is charged additionally with contempt of court – leading attorney William Kunstler to demand to know, “Alright, did everybody get everything off their chests?”
Enter Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton. “What in the name of Hell was that?!” He yells. “Apparently not.” Kunstler answers his own question. It’s a metatextual wisecrack in a script strewn with contextual commentary and weak stabs at humor such as Daphne’s line, “In France, one egg is ‘un oeuf’” (pronounced ‘enough’): a joke used in the director’s series, The West Wing. The Sorkin syndrome is no mystery to moviegoers – one of whom composed two compilations of the scribe’s recycled repartee – but it’s astonishing how far the veteran and others veer from the oft-cited motto, “Show – don’t tell.”
Cue character Abbie Hoffman’s conviction: “They’re gonna find us guilty of ‘I just don’t like you.’” Pan back to the spring of 2013. In the middle of HBO drama Phil Spector you’ll hear Helen Mirren proclaim, “They’re gonna convict him of ‘I just don’t like you’.”
Wan are these words in a voluptuous vocabulary like the English language; one whose gamut of gargantuan dimensions tops one hundred, fifty-thousand lexemes. Yet they are far from the sole key to open doors secluding corridors of narratives. François Truffaut’s 1980 The Last Metro follows actress Marion (Catherine Deneuve) as she hides Jewish husband, playwright Lucas Steiner in her theatre’s basement. Occupied Paris is the setting for the drama which sees sleuths of the Gestapo prey continuously on the cast of Lucas’ play La Disparue (“The vanished woman”). Loyal Marion balks at unbridled bids by her co-lead, Resistance sympathizer Bernard Granger, to lure every female into sexual submission.
Internally she vies with swiftly growing sentiments. Cutting Lucas’ hair amidst the ashen backdrop of his hovel, she accelerates her pace as he observes the radio is playing a beloved song of his: “Mon amant de Saint-Jean”. Stanzas unspool in waltzing rhythms as the lyrics ask how women cannot lose their heads when in “audacious arms”: “We always believe gentle vows of love shared by the eyes.”
Filling in for agony where Mahler’s music is amiss, Dirk Bogarde’s penetrating portrait of composer Gustav von Aschenbach sketches the story in Luchino Visconti’s 1971 Death in Venice. Plodding through a populace at risk of perishing from cholera – an epidemic carefully concealed – the middle-aged man melts amidst the Lido’s pastel colors in the early 1900s.
Somnolent are eyes half-open in the suffocating heat of a sirocco. A wedding ring and flashbacks to his youth let viewers know that Aschenbach has lost his wife and daughter. Held back from long-awaited greatness, he has been accused of having an ‘immunity to feeling’ on account of an intolerable stoicism. The script is scarce as Mother Nature spotlights an epitome of beauty out of his artistic reach: a golden-haired, near-silent, twelve-year-old. Dabbing spheres of sweat along his forehead, tousling greasy locks and listening to string musicians’ sloppy treatment of The Merry Widow waltz, Dirk Bogarde plays a man not in the fetters of erotic love but an obsession with a feat ideal. A haunting voice reminds the ailing loner in a flashback: “In all the world, there is no impurity so impure as old age.”
The chance to create novel art has come and gone.
Resting cameras reigned in indie films before the Steadicam pushed stillness to one side. John Cassavetes’ 1980 picture Gloria remains on Gena Rowlands for a while as the small Puerto Rican boy she saved from vengeful mobsters hangs her clothes up in their hotel bathroom. Sitting pensively, the childless fifty-something woman smokes in weary silence. To protect the youngling she has sacrificed her clout amidst the mafia and laid her life on a precarious line. Hounded are the creatures still as they prepare to run to Pittsburgh.
“You wanna be my mother?” Eight-year-old Phil’s tinkling tenor seeks to know. Both his parents and his sister have been killed. “You could be my father. I don’t have a mother. I don’t have any mother – more mother.” He corrects himself. “So you could be my mother. Why would you wanna be my mother?” The refrains can scarcely shake her stasis as her cigarette smoke spirals upward. Eventually he asks her if the warriors will track them down. “I don’t know.” Casually she muses. “Probably.” Brief silence. “You can’t beat the system.”
It’s a cliché as easily applied to social strictures as the current state of scenic art. A 2017 Los Angeles Times feature by Steven Zeitchik declares, “many directors are embracing a new moment. They’re making movies that include long stretches without speech or even sound at all.” Citing Guillermo Del Toro’s 2018 Oscar winner, The Shape of Water, he quotes the creator who asks, “What does love do? It renders you mute.”
Blather abounds throughout the film nevertheless. Despite its gorgeous green pelagic color palette and incessant homages to cinema, The Shape of Water is dependent on an omnipresent score: frolicsome flutes and perky passages on an accordion. Mute heroine Elisa languishes in her insufferable predicament. External forces hint at it too often for her soul to gain a genuine exposure. Bubbling by the humanoid amphibian with whom she falls in love accompanies her broom-and-bucket dance as she stirs coquetry into her toil at the laboratory; forties hit “You’ll Never Know” provides the soundtrack.
In case the public skips the parallel between the silently exploited girl and her adored inhuman creature – who is being treated as an asset in the 1960s Space Race – it is spelled out when her neighbor Giles translates her signing: “What am I?” He interprets for viewers. “I move my mouth – like him. I make no sound – like him.”
Whimsical traits of Technicolor splendor call to mind the 1939 Wizard of Oz… a children’s film with far less exposition.
Interspecial kinships can speak volumes on their characters’ behalves. A prime example of this bond comes in the second chapter of Kieślowski’s 1988 Dekalog: a ten-part series that conceptualizes the Commandments. Eyeing a sickly bee, the camera lingers on the insect as it manages to stumble out of sticky strawberry preserves and latch along a spoon. Terminally ill Andrzej is stunned by this prognostic sight alerting him to a miraculous recovery. Startling his doctor in the middle of the night, he pounds the office door with knocks to tell him he is cured.
Symbols seem deflated in contemporary victors of the cinematic playground. A lone fawn in a field alludes to the slain daughter of Frances McDormand’s Mildred in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). “How come you came up here outta nowhere looking so pretty?” She asks the deer. Seven months have passed since her child’s murder. “‘Cause you’re pretty, but you ain’t her.” Mildred must specify. “She got killed… and now she’s dead forever.” By this point the audience has heard this narrative and more than once. Yet her confessional release holds sway. McDormand plays the monologue with a magnificent restraint: proof that a mere three lines would have sufficed to draw the parallel.
Enigmatic car rides used to let us in on slivers of expression half-obscured by night-drenched windows. Dazzled by the bulbs of Tokyo, Bill Murray’s Bob rubs tired eyes and blinks in the backseat in Lost in Translation (2003). Decades earlier a drifting journalist squeezed his eyes shut whilst driving in Wim Wenders’ Alice in the Cities. Scarlet clouds surround the heroine of Gloria as blaring headlights lend her tunnel-sheltered taxicab a bloody hue. Resignedly she brushes her blond locks en route to meet the mobsters she will beg to spare Phil’s life.
Palpably these tacit snippets can prevail in our imagination decades after screening. Sometimes their meaning shuns significance; consumed beyond the confines of cognition.
Whispering a covert message in Scarlett Johansson’s ear at the end of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, Bill Murray shares a susurration some attempt to probe as though it were state secrets. Sadly for them the actor has remained discreet. Inflexions of his voice suggest it might be a mere morsel of advice; an ounce of counsel prior to their parting.
Mystery enshrouds a message Charlotte probably forgot. For feeling isn’t just a vessel for vocabulary but the reams of empty diary pages: truths left unexpressed.