Note sur le film : It's All So Quiet (Tout est si calme)

mars 14, 2018 En Notes sur le film

Boven is het stil
(It’s All So Quiet)
Directed by Nanouk Leopold
1h 33 mins, The Netherlands, 2013

I’ve watched a handful of movies lately that focus on the loneliness of their gay male characters ? Harvest, Yossi, A Single Man, La leon and now this one, Boven is het stil. As counter-intuitive as it seems, I find them refreshing. They remind us that the closet ? or closets, plural, which makes more sense for the varied depictions I’ve seen ? has emotional costs rather than simply political or purely social ones and that the individuals suffering inside them experience them first as that.

This gentle and quiet character study of a 50-something man taking care of his dying father on a tiny farm in the Netherlands has emotional costs on the patient viewer, as well, as we witness his subsequent rejection of two potential lovers. His self-inflicted isolation mirrors what he perceives as his father’s rejection of him. The film, despite what’s expected from its elliptical narrative strategy, puts too fine a point on that in a couple lines of unnecessary dialogue, but overall it’s a powerful portrait, made even more so by a final, self-reflexive intertitle.