The Quietude

The Quietude features one hell of a fucked up family. The WLW content in this film comes courtesy of two sisters who seem to share the opinion that it doesn’t count as incest if they don’t kiss on the mouth. I’m pretty sure that’s not how that works, ladies. And still, this semi/fully incestuous relationship between sisters is by far the most healthy dynamic going on in the family.

The Quietude takes its name from a family estate in Argentina. Like the name suggests, this estate and its family are keeping many things silent. Things kick off when family patriarch, Augusto suffers a stroke that lands him in the hospital. Oldest daughter, Eugenia flies in from Paris to offer support to her family and particularly, her sister Mía. Once Eugenia arrives, the family’s skeletons begin to exit their closets. Early on we see that the sisters’ mother clearly prefers Eugenia to Mía. And of course we see Eugenia and Mía having a relationship far too close. Eugenia and Mía share many things. Including a lover. Eugenia’s husband, Vincent is also Mía’s longtime lover. And then Eugenia announces she’s pregnant. So that’s complicated. Plus, as Augusto gets nearer to death, some of his secrets come out. Secrets that date back to the dark days of Argentina under dictatorship.

I’m a big fan of how The Quietude depicts its fucked up content. They underplay it. There’s this sense that the characters in the film and perhaps the film itself don’t quite realize how fucked up this all is. And that juxtaposition makes it all the more disturbing. This is a story about a family that has absolutely no idea how to be a normal family. Every relationship within the family unit isn’t just non-standard, it’s disturbing and sometimes criminal. But none of them talk about it. They just go through their lives, acting normal. And even when the secrets come out, it’s perhaps too late. The truth is a powerful thing. But even the truth can’t undo so many years of silence.

Certainly with Eugenia and Mía, their boundary-breaking relationship is underplayed. The main scene that suggests something untoward in their relationship is the sisters engaging in some mutual masturbation and collaborative dirty talk. What’s so disturbing about the scene is how light and playful it is. The sisters roll around on the sun-dappled bed, giggling. Far from this unusual dynamic seeming to weigh on the characters, it instead seems to make them lighter. They break a major cultural taboo with a smile and a laugh. So many of their scenes would look wholly romantic and uncomplicated without the context of them being sisters.

And seriously, whatever the fuck is going on between Eugenia and Mía is the healthiest dynamic on display in the film. When the girls aren’t masturbating together, we see a supportive and loving relationship. This relationship holds strong through all of the revelations and upheavals the family go through. If anything, it gets even stronger. Again, The Quietude is so disturbing because of how it depicts disturbing acts and relationships that the characters seem unaware of how fucked up they are. Where Eugenia and Mía end up at the end of the film is a place where they feel a lot of joy and have each other. It is almost romantic. But not just because of the incest but because of their family history, this ending feels like it will just continue another generation of family dysfunction.

With all of this family-based melodrama, The Quietude feels somewhere in between a soap opera and an actual opera. It’s the hugely competent directing of Pablo Trapero that makes it feel more like the latter. The shot composition here is beautiful, another layer of the juxtaposition between the disturbing story content and how it’s depicted. You’re not going to see a soap opera take this much time to get the lighting right or find the exact right angle for the camera to sit at to portray a mood. I suppose you also wouldn’t see that in an opera because it’s an entirely different artistic medium, but you know what I mean.

I’ve run out of ways to say that The Quietude was good because it portrayed disturbing content through the lens of characters underplaying or fully not understanding how disturbing it is. The film certainly doesn’t celebrate or promote these actions. But instead, it adds a rich layer to a portrait of a family who are so completely divorced from a healthy family model that they can’t even see all the ways their family is deeply fucked up. It’s a deeply effective story tactic for a very engaging, unpleasant journey to the rotten core of this family and all its secrets and silence.

Overall rating: 7.5/10

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