Bille August directed Silent Heart, a Danish film about a family that spends one last Christmas in spirit weekend with each other before the matriarch dies. While everyone tries to make the best of the situation eventually their doubts create conflict that threaten the matriarch’s plans for her final act. Will she be able to complete her plan or will her family take away the last vestige of her autonomy before the disease overtakes her? When I was younger, I regularly enjoyed August’s work: The House of Spirits, Smilla’s Sense of Snow and Les Miserables, but after the nineties, it seems as if he fell off the American mainstream movie radar, and I simply forgot about him. I only heard about this movie when I decided to see Blackbird, the American remake of this film with the same screenwriter.
Silent Heart is proof that while the story’s framework never changed, acting and directing play a crucial role in whether or not a film succeeds in feeling real or feeling created. At ninety-four minutes, this film melodramatically falls apart in the final act, but in comparison to its American counterpart, it is a masterpiece. August takes his time character building, and the editing has an innate sense of rhythm that is completely missing in the remake. Character building includes the property where the family lives. Production design and location scouting make this film vibe with the audience in an organic way whereas the American film feels aspirational and commercial.
The editing gradually adds elements as Silent Heart unfolds. It starts quietly focused on the matriarch alone, which forebodes her ultimate destiny. Then it shows the surrounding property before it adds characters. When characters appear, they have time to exist in their own space before they interact with each other so we have an intimate sense of who they really are and what they really feel before they are thrown together. Once together, the audience has a chance to compare and contrast behavior to see how the characters are doing their best to perform for their mother and suppress themselves. The real tension is seeing when they will break character, give in to their nature and become themselves. They are not actors, but people grappling with an untenable situation.
Silent Heart is a movie, and they are actually actors. These actors are apparently great ones since we are able to feel as if they are a family with a history and identity that we seem to instinctually know. Unlike the American film, the father and the matriarch’s best friend do not get that much of the spotlight and are almost afterthoughts in this film, which could be why the denouement feels a bit ginned up, but the movie really belongs to the women of the family: Paprika Steen as the elder daughter, Heidi, and Danica Curcic as the younger daughter, Sanne. They are polar opposites, and the cast and filmmakers have a great sympathy for them. The film took me on an emotional journey regarding how I felt about each of them, and while I did not always enjoy that manipulation, the movie at least dared to elevate the characters and performances above caricature and tropes. Heidi, in the wrong hands, could come off as a severe character, but Steen imbues her with an interior dialogue by projecting her conflicting emotions on her face. In Steen’s deft hands, she makes Heidi relatable, not alienating. Curcic unflinchingly embraces the worst aspects of her character and is frankly unlikeable, but she feels organically human even when the screenplay fails her that you can pull for her and not completely write her off.
The younger daughter’s boyfriend, Dennis, whom Pilou Asbaek plays, is best known as Euron Greyjoy in Game of Thrones and has never given a bad, uncommitted performance as far as I can tell, is simultaneously the worst and best person to bring to the occasion because he has no family history and connects with everyone in a way that would be inappropriate if he was not a stranger, but exactly what they need to get people to experience the moment instead of play through it. His character is missing in spirit in the American remake and is stripped down for parts given to more central characters to clothe themselves with.
Silent Heart works in a way that Blackbird never can maybe because I am unfamiliar with these actors, and there is no vanity in their performance. The filmmaker allows Steen, Curcic and Asbaek to carry the film and truly let their performances breathe in a way that is devoid in Blackbird, and I only was interested in that movie because of the cast. It also does not hurt that Ghita Norby, who plays the matriarch, and Oskar Saelan Halskov, who plays her grandson, act and look like normal human beings, not movie stars. If there are any Danish people who saw this film and are willing to slide over to IMDb to look up the American cast, I would be grateful if you would inform me if these Danish actors are around the same equivalent of famous and personality type as their American counterparts, especially the son in law. Norby and Curcic share a fearless scene that ties the movie together when it should have fallen like a failed souffle, but such raw emotional power is too uncomfortable for American audiences yet it is the stuff that families are made of.
Just as I recommend films for a certain period, neither Silent Heart, nor Blackbird may be good films to watch during a pandemic. It is the first time that I found myself silently resenting a fictional family for having room to take long walks without encountering a stranger so they would not have to wear masks assuming that they quarantined before the weekend. I found myself asking how they got their property and considering whether or not it was ethical. These thoughts are completely irrelevant to the movie. I am sure that no one who participated in this film truly thought of the ethics of wealth when creating this film, but as a viewer, it was definitely difficult to not consider.
The first and second acts of Silent Heart are perfect, but as the movie loses momentum and flounders to stumble towards the ending, it manages to retain enough good will not to make me throw up my hands in despair. I was a little disappointed for the film not being more daring in the reveal and borrowing a page from A Picture of You, which seemed like an instinctual plot twist to further the story, but I am an American and maybe I am trying to dilute the gravity of the situation. Still I am not the one who turned the whole proceeding into a soap opera in the final act. I would have been satisfied if the film took a more French approach to death and family with no one even batting an eyelash at that revelation.
Silent Heart is no A Christmas Tale, which I highly recommend, but if you find it intriguing, do not even bother seeing the American remake. There are subtitles, but August fans and viewers who savor magnificent performances could put in the effort and be rewarded.
