Hideaway

Back in the 1980s, the late Michael Powell (1905-1990) expressed the wish that he could have made a silent film -- a movie that would be pure cinema, purely visual, with no dialogue needed to tell its story or express the emotional lives of its characters. Powell got close to this goal with parts of Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, and The Tales of Hoffmann, but never quite achieved it with an entire movie. Francois Ozon's drama Hideaway (original French title Le Refuge), however, seems to be precisely what Powell was aiming for -- a story so perfectly told with visuals that subtitles are virtually unnecessary for the English-speakin...