By Omeleto
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Offered since 2010, MyFrenchFilmFestival showcases the breathtaking diversity and quality of contemporary French cinema. Omeleto is proud to partner with UniFrance to highlight short film selections from the collection, which range from charming children’s animations to gritty psychodramas to quietly resonant family narratives. No matter what the genre, this group of shorts highlights the creative risk-taking and emotional depth that makes French cinematic art uniquely vibrant.
Alice visits a hospital, tense and nervous as she makes her way through the building’s maze of corridors. But she’s on a mission: she wants to confront an attacker from her past before he passes away on his deathbed.
But freeing herself from the traumas of her past doesn’t quite go the way Alice expects, both due to external obstacles like hospital bureaucracy and unsuspecting family members. The closure she desperately desires seems to elude her, and she must seek a sense of resolution in another way.
Written and directed by Elodie Wallace, this precise, surprising short drama builds with a taut tension and edginess to a confrontation. But it veers into an unexpected direction getting there, upturning the expected trajectory of healing into an entirely new odyssey that’s a surprising take on what it means to face the past and move forward into the future.
Constructed with a muted sense of naturalism, the pacing and tone get progressively tighter and volatile, especially as Alice propels herself towards her dying perpetrator. The visuals have tension and restlessness in the movement and moodiness with its shadows and darker colors. In many ways, it resembles a thriller and a drama in its heaviness and melancholy.
But the absurdness of life — in the form of bureaucracy and the impenetrability of a hospital — offers a set of obstacles that are almost hilarious in their mundaneness. They spin Alice into discombobulating directions, but eventually, she — and the rest of the story — finds her way back to her directive.
Lead actor Sarah Suco offers an understated, deeply moving performance of a woman grappling with a dark trauma of her past, which weighs her down in her present. Suco captures the way that sufferers of trauma and abuse can be haunted by their traumas, as well as the desperation to find freedom from that pain. This propels Alice forward towards her goal, no matter what obstacles are thrown in her way — she desires nothing more than to deliver her anger at her abuser. But the obstacles that get her way also transmute her raw anger into something else entirely — something deeper at the core than she expected.
“Not a Word” builds up like a thriller in many ways, but its climax is much quieter and yet more nakedly emotional than expected. Issues of accountability and closure eat away at Alice. Alice seeks an external route to closure, demanding that her voice and story is heard and taken to heart by the perpetrator of her pain. Yet the sad truth is that many perpetrators are often never in the position to take responsibility for the full consequences of their abusive, cruel and selfish actions. Victims like Alice may find their voices, but they still might not get heard. So then they must find closure in other ways, to emerge from their pasts with a sense of freedom and vindication.
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This post was previously published on YouTube.
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Photo credit: Screenshot from video
