Martin Scorsese
Silence

From my blog.

Someone once said: «Compared to Silence, other films from recent Scorsese seem like mere exercises in style or slightly more». True, this time good old Martin has crafted a work of very high specific gravity, a film contemplated for thirty years, with demanding content, to put it mildly. The filmmaker read Endo’s book in 1988, but wasn’t sure how to approach it and also found it a subject not easily proposed to production companies. Nevertheless, this gigantic work seems perfect in the timing with which it was made: with a mature Scorsese, highly experienced, impeccable from a formal point of view but with the extreme need to return to making truly demanding films. And so Silence can in part be compared, in specific gravity and cinematic vision setup, to a work like Gangs of New York, because like that movie, it says more than what it actually says, aiming to tell paradigmatic stories, emblematic of something larger. Where the epic was built there, with all its violent contradictions, of the United States, here the objective is even higher and more ambitious.

Narrating the stories of fathers Rodrigues and Garupe in 17th century Japan, Scorsese, in reality, tells many other things, about the Church, Christianity, the origins of both, human condition, religious conflicts and their impossibility to be overcome, the relationship between temporal power and spirituality. And even more: in the stories of the many humble and peasants who cross paths with the two Jesuit fathers, but also in their own fates, there are projections of the passion of Jesus Christ himself, and of the problematic and unresolved relationship between man and God; this film is about mankind. I cannot interpret Kichijiro’s story in any way other than as a symbolic representation of man’s story, his continuous weaknesses, his inherent fragility and yet his faith, always on the brink but always ready to renew itself. These few references are enough to understand the quantity and quality of the content: surely Shūsaku Endō’s novel must have played a fundamental role in exploring so many such topics.

But this does not diminish the work done by Jay Cocks and Scorsese himself, who hadn’t written his own film since 1995 with Casino. And it’s no coincidence that Jay Cocks returns, already a screenwriter of Gangs of New York, with which Silence shares an overall affinity. The writing has imperfections, but they are minor in light of the enormous merits. The words of the protagonists continually meet their contingent needs of tracing the skeleton of a story hic et nunc and at the same time pose general questions, extremely delicate, without certain answers. And thus it matters little if sometimes the repetitions are evident, if some passages provoke hilarity, if not all dialogues are perfectly convincing: the overall structure is impressive.

The first half of the film is splendid, a journey at the limit of the human, both on a spiritual level and in the pragmatic dimension of the two fathers. Scorsese moves wonderfully in the natural settings of Taiwan and Taipei. The sea, the meadows, the clouds, everything functions precisely within the diegetic construction, with no evident force. When moving to urban environments, the fascination is slightly less, but here too the set elements continue to have important functions: from the bars of a cell, the arrangement of the seats for the Japanese judges, to the torture instruments for Christians. Scorsese makes the most out of the few elements he had available and cloaks them all in great symbolic meanings: the beards, the hair, the clothes, the spots on the skin, everything changes slowly and inexorably, with the changing situation and Father Rodrigues’ intentions. Perhaps the second half loses something from a directorial point of view, because as religious and moral issues become more complex and refined, the visual and dramatic component of the mise-en-scène tends to give too much room to the necessity of explanation. It never goes overboard, but there is a certain simplification in the shots and stylistic constructions.

What to say about the characters: Kichijiro is an emblematic figure and is perfectly embodied by Yōsuke Kubozuka, with his lost expressions, of animalistic innocence. Father Rodrigues is decidedly more complex and embraces within him the whole central aporia of the film: is it more righteous to remain consistent with one’s faith and condemn many innocent peasants to atrocious sufferings, or to apparently abjure and save them from a dire fate? In any case, the missionary journey in Japan is doomed to failure, but the meaning goes beyond: faced with the alterities inherent in different cultural sensitivities and in different human political-religious forms, it is impossible to hypothesize a path devoid of suffering. Thus, man’s legacy is this, heading towards a fate of suffering, of mortification, of the soul or body.

And even the minor characters are extraordinary: from the poor condemned peasants who relive the passion of Christ on the cross, to the Inquisitor, sketched as a comedic character to signal his irreconcilable distance from the Christian feeling and at the same time the absence of true evil intent. His is a cold reasoning, similar to all representatives of the Japanese power: the enemies are not truly evil, but mere representative pawns of a drama that is greater than them, it belongs to all humanity. Up to the interpreter (Tadanobu Asano), a symbol of the wisest component of Japanese thought.

Stylistically, it’s clear that Silence does not represent a typical moment of Scorsese’s style; it would have been absurd to expect it. However, the choices are all perfectly functional: from moments of absolute silence, to the use of sound effects to give a sense of solitude, to the saturated and reddish photography in some passages. The slow editing might seem excessively languid, but it is fundamental for unraveling all the issues well. The only slightly discordant note comes, in my view, in the finale, when a highlight is made that wasn’t necessary, especially in a work like this, which poses questions rather than giving answers.

8/10