Atmospheric, dreamlike and haunting, Greek drama Silence 6-9 makes demands on its audience, but rewards those who buy into its heavily stylised poetic language. This cryptic fairy tale for adults marks the solo feature-directing debut of Christos Passalis, an actor best known for his roles in Greek Weird Wave classics including Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009) as well as more recent surrealist fare like Syllas Tzoumerkas’ The Miracle of the Sargasso Sea (2019).
Passalis, who also plays the male lead here, has a long history in experimental theatre, which informs this sustained exercise in mournful absurdism, with its undertones of Beckett, Ionesco and David Lynch. The most uncompromising contender playing in the main Crystal Globe competition at Karlovy Vary film festival this week, Silence 6-9 is emphatically art-house in style, but still a boldly original work with potential cult appeal.
Aris (Passalis) meets Anna (fellow Dogtooth veteran Angeliki Papoulia) in a dystopian landscape peppered with concrete ruins, deserted highways and dead birds. Both are heading for a remote hotel perched on rocky coastline near a small town thronged by clusters of mysterious antennae, which can seemingly pick up ghostly messages from loved ones who have inexplicably disappeared. Only audible during enforced periods of public silence, these fuzzy, muddy recordings are stored on old-fashioned audio cassettes. But a growing protest movement doubts the authenticity of this mystical communication channel, while others wait in vain for messages from long-lost lovers that never materialise.
Unable to sleep, Anna and Aris pass their free time going on long walks. Their conversations are gnomic, monosyllabic and oddly blank, but still crackle with romantic and erotic tension. Aris has supposedly been offered a job working on the antennae, but Kafka-esque bureaucratic chaos greets him when he tries to report for work. Anna is training for a bizarre role-playing position impersonating one of the disappeared, a ritualised public performance of collective grief that is part emotional release and part sexualised peep show. Meanwhile, a pair of bickering hotel workers (Sofia Kokkali and Maria Skoula) watch over the duo, commenting on their behaviour in classic Greek chorus style. There is deadpan comedy here, amidst all the disquieting otherness.
What does this all mean? According to the director’s eccentric Karlovy Vary press notes, which include scrambled visual artworks and oblique allusion to Radiohead lyrics, Silence 6-9 is a “a film about the inability or the impossibility to say goodbye” which takes place in a “middle world between reality and dream.” The non-literal, allegorical narrative certainly makes little sense on a naturalistic level. But there are revelatory shifts in perspective midway through which help root these characters in a more recognisable setting, lending extra melancholy weight to their uncertain fate.
Shot with a precise eye, often using glacially slow pans and zooms, Silence 6-9 is full of arresting visual tableaux: a vast oceans of abandoned cars, a hotel room piled with mountains of earth, silhouettes framed against painterly seascapes. A hypnotic audio track of sound design, layered with bleeps and whirrs, hums and hisses, is a crucial part of the overall package. Even if the story is maddeningly opaque in places, Passalis has created an immersive sensory fable that builds to a surprisingly emotional conclusion.
Venue: Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (Crystal Globe competition)
Cast: Angeliki Papoulia, Christos Passalis, Sofia Kokkali, Maria Skoula, Marisha Triantafyllidou, Vassilis Karaboulas
Director: Christos Passalis
Screenplay: Christos Passalis, Eleni Vergeti
Cinematography: Giorgos Karvelas
Editing: Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Marios Kleftakis
Music: Yiannis Loukos, Antonis Georgou
Sound design: Persefoni Miliou, Kostas Varybopiotis
Art director: Márton Ágh
Producer: Maria Drandaki
Production company: Homemade Films (Greece)
World sales: Homemade Films
In Greek
81 minutes
