Winner of the Silver Shell for best direction in San Sebastián in 2015 with The White Knights, Belgian Joaquim Lafosse returns to the Zinemaldia competition with Un Silence, his tenth and uncomfortable film that addresses the horror of pedophilia, inspired by a case. real, that of the lawyer Victor Hissel, who in the 90s defended the parents of two victims of the pedophile Marc Dutrcoux and in 2008 was convicted of possession of child pornography.
From there, the author of Losing Reason has used a script co-written with Chloé Duponchelle and Paul Ismael in which he places the viewer in front of facts that make the hair stand on end. The one starring Daniel Auteuil as a famous lawyer obsessed with a high-profile case of pedophilia. He lives in a huge house with his wife and his adopted teenage son. His eldest daughter doesn’t want to see him. And when she tells her mother that a relative is going to denounce her father for an episode of sexual abuse committed 30 years ago, the apparent family tranquility is shattered.
The lawyer’s wife, Astrid, played by a grim-faced Emmanuelle Devos, decided to forgive her husband a long time ago and turn the page on a traumatic episode that occurred when she was pregnant. However, the son will seek justice. And all this in front of a press deployed day and night around the mansion in search of the scoop.
“We live in a time in which we try to listen accurately and be more attentive in the case of sexual abuse. With this story we wanted to push people to speak. I think it is necessary to interrogate the way in which reason does not speak. Many Sometimes people are ashamed to talk about certain topics and the shame is accompanied by a feeling of guilt. I wanted to be the lawyer for the son, who is a victim, just like Astrid, who when she was pregnant was in a fragile moment. No. It is she who has committed sexual abuse. She has lost her voice, she is drowning and does not speak. And when she realizes that she has not spoken it is too late. Her silence is not complicit but induced by trauma, Lafosse points out in conversation with La Vanguardia at the María Cristina hotel.
In this regard, he elaborates: “There is a generation that has decided to speak after Metoo and then there is another generation, that of our fathers and mothers, who find it difficult to speak. The fear of the consequences of sexual abuse also leads to silence. And I was interested in knowing why someone remains silent when abuse has been committed in the family environment. We can imagine that if we encounter someone perverse it is because we are fragile. And if we are fragile, when the crime comes there is little reason to find the strength and the will of a fair position. We must avoid judging and, on the other hand, if there are people who have been silent for too long and who are complicit, we can be sure that there will be even more silence.
Lafosse assures that his job as a filmmaker “is not to tell the truth about any real event, but to try to write characters that allow us to think. More than knowing what happens, I am interested in knowing how situations like this can occur.” He assumes that pedophilia occurs in all social classes, although in this case the monster lives in a nice house, with a nice car and wears expensive clothes. And he does not admit his guilt. “Taking care of the victims of a pedophile case when you are a pedophile is a perversion,” says Lafosse, who confesses that he is not one of those who believe that such characters can be redeemed.
