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The Quiet Room

1996, Movie, PG, 91 mins

The Quiet Room: Review

QUIET ROOM, THE
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Tolstoy wrote that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, but he neglected to mention that some of them are tedious. A nameless 7-year-old (Chloe Ferguson) stops talking in a small act of rebellion against her parents, whose marriage is collapsing. Writer-director Rolf de Heer takes the wrong road from the start, forcing the narrative into the narrow, claustrophobic point of view of a child whose silence belies an inner life that's a wall-to-wall jumble of words, naïve judgments and opinions. De Heer's meticulous recreation of life at 7 -- the minutes spent staring at goldfish in a tank, the preoccupation with rhyming, the reluctance to get dressed -- highlights the carelessness with which he treats the film's adults: The flashbacks to the halcyon days of loving parents playing with their 3-year-old (Phoebe Ferguson) are particularly trite. It's one thing for his youthful protagonist not to see the intricacies of adult life, but quite another for the director to ignore them. In her interminable interior monologue, the morose girl inveighs against language, but her essential insight -- that adults are failed by language -- contradicts the film's own reliance on words. If there's a dramatic conflict here, it's entirely lost in the hodgepodge of chaotic chatter. Skip it, don't rent it, forget about it. leave a comment
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