This film was given to me (on DVD) by a member of the audience for one of my introduced screenings of La famille Bélier (France 2014). The suggestion was that it was similar in many ways to the later French film. There are certainly some close similarities in the script – but also several important differences. The two films are also different in their use of genre repertoires and the way they are positioned for audiences. I don’t think that the French producers need worry about plagiarism charges.
The main similarity is that the central character is a girl, Lara, who grows up with deaf parents and from an early age she must ‘translate’ for them with officialdom. When she is 8 she is given a clarinet by her aunt Clara and she will eventually decide that she wants to train as a professional musician and therefore needs to audition for a conservatory. Beyond these two central features, the narratives of the two films are quite different and where La famille Bélier is primarily a comedy and a ‘feelgood film’, Beyond Silence is a family drama.
The family drama comes about mainly because of the antagonism between Lara’s father Martin and his sister Clara. Their family is middle-class with tensions about Martin’s deafness (with bad advice for the parents) and Clara’s pursuit of music (a frivolous career?). The adult Clara hasn’t had a child, her relationship with Gregor is not going well and she possibly sees Lara as a kind of surrogate musical daughter (a position which she knows will anger Martin). There are important flashbacks to Martin and Clara as children in the 1960s and family history weighs heavily. Lara’s mother Kai is on the outside of this and she doesn’t appear to have a family. When later she gives birth to a second girl, also with hearing, things seem to look up.
One of the ‘users’ on IMDB suggests that Beyond Silence is a kind of German ‘problem picture’. I can understand the suggestion but I think that it’s more that this is a family drama, pushed further towards the art cinema end of the spectrum. There is tragedy in the film, which Martin foolishly suggests is partly Lara’s fault, and the ending is positive but not conclusive. It really is that this is a story in which things happen much as they might do to anyone outside of studio genre movies.
Because the narrative spans ten years, the producers had the problem that Lara had to be played by two actors, one 8 years-old and the other 18. Tatjana Trieb and Sylvie Testud sound as if they are both too old (Testud being 24?) but they are both convincing and the transition works. All the other adult family roles have to age 10 years and again this works OK. Lara’s parents are played by deaf actors. Howie Seago is American and Emmanuelle Laborit is French. The search for authenticity meant that Emmanuelle Laborit was possibly too young for the role (she is roughly the same age as Sylvie Testud who plays her 18 year-old daughter). Again, I didn’t notice this and it wasn’t a problem but it does point to casting issues with deaf actors. (Testud was also born in France.)
The film was co-written by Caroline Link and Beth Serlin and directed by Link. One of the arguments for the casting of La famille Bélier was that major stars were needed to promote the film widely. Most of the cast for Beyond Silence were not well-known actors, never mind ‘stars’. It was Link’s first feature film as director. Through screenings at festivals the film began to pick up many awards and was eventually selected as Germany’s entry for the Foreign Language Oscar. It didn’t win but five years later Link did win the Oscar with her third film Nowhere in Africa (Nirgendwo in Afrika, 2001). Beyond Silence finally got a limited release in the UK in 1999. The Arrow DVD eventually appeared in 2010 and should still be available. In Europe, Beyond Silence attracted nearly 2 million cinema admissions, mostly in Germany and Switzerland. Surprisingly it doesn’t seem to have been released in France.
I’ve seen some criticism of Beyond Silence on the grounds that it doesn’t explore enough what Lara’s success/musical talent means for her parents. There is some justification in the charge, even if the deaf/hearing relationship is explored a little more via Lara’s romance with a deaf teacher – a man who has hearing himself, but who is the son of a deaf father. Compared to La famille Bélier, Beyond Silence lacks the emotional immediacy of the French comedy, partly because the clarinet music is less easy to engage with and we, the audience, don’t see much of Lara learning it, whereas much of the comedy of La famille Bélier comes from the choir rehearsals. On the other hand, Beyond Silence offers a more nuanced view of what the situation means for the young woman at the centre of the narrative.
Des informs me that there is an Indian film with a similar theme, so I’ll look out for it.
German trailer:
The Case for Global Film 