समाचार

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.