Review: Marleen Gorris’s Feminist Cri de Coeur A Question of Silence on Cult Epics Blu-ray

Given the aesthetics of A Question of Silence and its characters’ desire to uncover the motives of three women who suddenly attack and kill the male owner of a boutique, it’s understandable that Dave Kehr wrote that Marleen Gorris’s debut film “was built on a fashionable confusion of fascism and feminism.” But while much of A Question of Silence’s power comes from the steady, meticulous accrual of realistic microaggressions and outright misogyny that these women face on a daily basis, their violent act, as well as their lack of empathy or regret after the fact, is better read as purely symbolic rather than as the filmmaker’s tacit endorsement of their crime.

The film’s scenes are given a sense of verisimilitude by its on-location shooting in Amsterdam, and that raw authenticity brushes up against highly stylized sequences (shades of Rainer Werner Fassbinder) that are punctuated by moody bursts of synthesizers. It’s a collision of seemingly discordant styles, yet Gorris’s balancing act is nothing if not precise, allowing as much room for realistic portrayals of misogynistic debasements embedded in quotidian life as symbolic peeks into the women’s rejections of and attacks against the patriarchy.

In perhaps the film’s canniest narrative move, a court-assigned female psychiatrist, Janine (Cox Habbema), interviews each of the murderesses—introverted housewife Christine (Edda Barends), outspoken waitress Ann (Nelly Fridja), and cunning secretary Andrea (Henriëtte Tol)—to determine their sanity. And the depiction of these interviews reveals the myriad ways in which the women are dismissed, casually abused, or directly attacked (typically through misogynistic language excused by supposed humor), all of which we see via flashbacks.

There’s a vivid specificity to Gorris’s representations of the offenses made against the women, from Andrea’s boss dismissing her business advice despite her appearing more prepared and knowledgeable than him, to Christine’s husband complaining about her children’s misbehavior. Yet each woman functions less like a distinct individual than a representative of her class—metaphorical pawns in the larger game of feminist chess that Gorris plays throughout the film.

Janine, too, is sucked into this game, as her upper-middle-class contentment (a happy marriage, a successful career) initially scans as a rebuff to the suffering of Christine, Ann, an Andrea. After all, if she can be satisfied and successful within an established power structure, why can’t they? The differences between her and the women whose sanity she’s assessing are both large and small, and Gorris spends much of the film addressing these various rifts.

While Janine’s husband (Eddy Brugman) and every other male she comes across declare the women to be insane, she discovers through her expert analysis that they actually might not be. None had tragic childhoods, were physically abused by their spouses, or work for any real social or political causes. The sudden, and excruciatingly brutal, murder they commit is shocking—all the more so because the motive stems not from any individual indiscretion, but a stifling systemic oppression that is, by its very nature, invisible to the men around them.

Dissenters of A Question of Silence have complained that its male characters are unambiguously contemptuous and clueless. But that’s by design. Gorris is interested in deploying her male characters solely as metaphorical representations of patriarchal power. Ultimately, the innocence of the murdered shopkeeper—whose only crime is being a bit of a smug asshole to Christine after catching her shoplifting—is part of the point. When we see the murder just past the film’s midpoint, it’s clearly a symbolic act against male power and influence (it’s revealed that the women performed a genital mutilation on the man with broken glass and hangers).

A Question of Silence is a cry of rage against a system that’s long silenced women, diminished their accomplishments, and held them to sexist double standards. Yet, ironically, it ends not with a scream, but the extended laughter of women following the prosecutor’s suggestion that the defendants would have committed the same crime if the boutique owner were a man. The shrieking laughter shakes the men of the court to the cores, even more so than the descriptions of the grisly murder. After all, the only thing powerful men like less than women attacking them is women upending their authority by mocking their obliviousness and incompetence.

Image/Sound

Cult Epics’s 2K transfer from a recent restoration shows some scratches and other forms of damage, but it reaches a fine level of color reproduction and detail. A Question of Silence appears to have been shot on 16mm (technical info about the film is limited), which would explain why the image is on the softer side and why, even on Blu-ray, it looks very much like a film of its era. As such, consider the lo-fi look more of a feature than a bug, and of a piece with the very-early-’80s synthesizers that pop up throughout, though on the sound front, nothing is as chilling as the repeated sound of cackling laughter, which comes through loud and clear.

Extras

In her captivating audio commentary, film scholar Patricia Pisters focuses on the role of class in A Question of Silence and the subtle ways that misogyny affects each of the main characters in different, yet equally destructive, ways. She also spends ample time discussing the film’s various locations, Marleen Gorris’s untraditional route to filmmaking, and the major players’ acting backgrounds, though the track is marked by some frustratingly long stretches of dead air.

The disc also includes two interviews. In the first, Gorris discusses the real-life story that inspired the film and the limitations of the moniker “women’s films.” In the second, Cox Hebbema, appearing on a Dutch talk show devoted to cinema, talks about the controversy of the film, her approach to acting, and offers some astute opinions on other contemporaneous films discussed on the program, most notably Michelangelo Antonioni’s Investigation of a Woman.

Overall

Marleen Gorris’s striking, provocative debut has lost none of its righteous, subversive force.