silence and the mentality of belief

Watched Si­lence.

I must give a warn­ing though. This is a sto­ry of my coun­try (and my re­gion) and I was so ready to love this film pri­or to view­ing.

It’s a film about Por­tuguese mis­sion­ar­ies in Japan whose faith was put to ex­treme tests. It chal­lenges the au­di­ence by ask­ing the true val­ue and form of faith.

What does it re­al­ly mean to have a faith? Is it re­al­ly worth cost­ing your lives, and some­one else’s? Is there a place for an apo­s­ta­tised? Is Je­sus wait­ing at the height of mankind or at the op­po­site end? Si­lence does not take a side, nor does it have its own an­swer.

There are no clear good and bad guys, though the Japan­ese per­se­cu­tion is quite harsh (Japan used to em­brace Chris­tian­i­ty but de­cid­ed to ban it for a num­ber of rea­sons. Even the main ‘an­tag­o­nist’ was once a Chris­t­ian).

The ques­tions it asks sticks long af­ter the ex­pe­ri­ence, in­clud­ing to sec­u­lar ones such as my­self. For this rea­son, Shūsaku Endō’s orig­i­nal nov­el de­served­ly earns the place of one of the most dis­cussed Chris­t­ian writ­ings of the last cen­tu­ry, as does the film adap­ta­tion.

If you do not have the slight­est in­ter­est in re­li­gion or the men­tal­i­ty of be­lief, you are prob­a­bly not go­ing to en­joy it. On the oth­er hand, I’ve seen de­vout Chris­tians dis­miss­ing the ma­te­r­i­al, to whom the an­swer to its ques­tions seem quite ob­vi­ous (e.g. apos­ta­sy is some­thing some­one rot­ten-mind­ed does and their life af­ter that does not de­serve at­ten­tion). So, if you are just too much of Chris­t­ian, you may not en­joy it ei­ther.

Be­cause of the sub­ject mat­ter that takes up the most of the dis­cus­sion, it is easy to for­get that this film is ar­tis­ti­cal­ly and tech­ni­cal­ly stun­ning too. De­spite its rather sim­ple sto­ry, this film re­flects that it came from a rather length­ly nov­el. De­spite that, I was to­tal­ly im­mersed in the beau­ti­ful cin­e­matog­ra­phy, act­ing, and at­mos­phere al­most com­plete­ly de­void of mu­sic (even the end­ing cred­it is not a song, but the beau­ti­ful sound of the na­ture) – not to men­tion the gut-wrench­ing strug­gle that the main char­ac­ters go through. The first half is al­most mono­chrome whose vi­su­als takes a lot of cues from clas­si­cal Japan­ese films, and it grad­u­al­ly sat­u­rates into the sec­ond half. It’s a stun­ning film to look at.

An­drew Garfield and Adam Dri­ver do fan­tas­tic jobs as Por­tuguese Je­suits, as does the Japan­ese cast. Es­pe­cial­ly Is­sey Oga­ta – he al­most feels like Christoph Waltz in his pres­ence.

I give a lot of cred­it for the language/dialect di­rec­tion; this takes place near my home­town and I am very fa­mil­iar with the di­alect there. I am usu­al­ly frus­trat­ed at how bad Japan­ese speech is in Hol­ly­wood films (prob­a­bly be­cause they do not hire ac­tu­al Japan­ese ac­tors) and I nor­mal­ly can­not even hope to hear an ac­cu­rate di­alect. On the oth­er end, Japan­ese ac­tors have been ter­ri­ble with Eng­lish di­a­logues for a long time, so much so that bilin­gual films dis­tract me when I see them; tho a lot has im­proved since The Last Samu­rai (2003) though. The lev­el of au­then­tic­i­ty that Scors­ese sought and the Japan­ese ac­tors’ flu­en­cy in Eng­lish is in­cred­i­bly high for what I ex­pect.

I give it 10/10. Its theme can be dis­cussed in so many ways that I will not go through them in length here, but I re­al­ly want to talk about it in per­son. So please see it, come see me, let us sit to­geth­er, grab a beer (or sake), and have a good chat.
 
 

—toshi oma­gari

Flom­mist Toshi Oma­gari fights many things, most re­cent of which is the auto-cor­rec­tion of his ti­tle to florist. Copy­right © 2017 Toshi Oma­gari.

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