“Not a word” by Hanna Slak rings false – Libération

2024-10-09 04:33:00

Slovenian Hanna Slak evokes all the clichés of family drama and tells the harmful relationship between a mother and her son.

The relationship between Nina (Maren Eggert), a famous conductor, and her son Lars (Jona Levin Nicolai) seems very toxic: they cross paths as strangers in their large Munich apartment, they barely exchange a few words and when Lars finds himself unconscious in the emergency room after a suicide attempt, Nina doesn’t dare hold his hand. In remission, the teenager asks to go green for a few days; their little house on the French Atlantic coast will therefore act as a catalyst for this mother-son rivalry and, perhaps, for a reunion at the end of the tunnel.

Nina’s professional life that invades her daily life, the shadow of an absent father-husband, the harassment of Lars’s classmate… In Not a wordSlovenian Hanna Slak seems to have called on all the family drama clichés to generate maximum sparks. The film never loses a sense of artificiality: behind the façade austerity provided by the staging – a true cliché of European festival cinema – the affects reveal themselves to be constantly guided by painstaking writing. The film is also dotted with small expected metaphors that complete this deliberate emphasis: for example, a lighter hidden by Lars, which symbolically “sets fire to the dust” between him and his mother, or a boat in tatters which in the end will be a question of repair together with the filial bond.

Unwanted ringtones and vibrations

The most recurring analogy revolves around the use of cell phones, whose unwanted ringtones and vibrations continually interrupt the exchanges between Nina and Lars, highlighting their difficulty in communicating. If Slak attempts to tackle a contemporary problem, the underlying idea is neither very subtle (not five minutes go by without a device starting to beep), nor very new: the technology that supposedly brings us closer actually helps to move away. The director places this observation even at the beginning of the film, in a sequence in which Lars, from his room, sends a drone equipped with a camera to observe his mother while she plays the piano instead of reaching her in person. They will have to exile themselves in the desert, away from all these hi-tech parasites, to hope to find themselves; we immediately understand the kind of somewhat crude oppositions that punctuate this film with an unfortunately very Manichean soundtrack.

Not a word by Hanna Slak with Maren Eggert, Maryam Zaree, Marko Mandić… 1 h 27.