Reviews

5 to 7 is a smart, endearing, and entertaining film, well interpreted and, while in the course of deftly playing off cultural stereotypes, resonantly manifesting significant character development.

The plot revolves around a romance with repercussions that demonstrate a significant gap between American and French social mores. That very gap becomes the stage for the film's comic zone, where the protagonist and his parents manifest the angst that generates its constant chuckles and a few really good belly-laughs.

The film fits squarely into the Uptown New York awkwardness-generates-witty-repartee pattern that has been so well established by Woody Allen and followed by Whit Stillman. Well crafted dialogue delivered convincingly.

Anton Yelchin turns in a compelling performance as the protagonist, Brian. He interprets a highly endearing character: sensitive, intelligent, thoughtful, driven and respectful. He and each of the principle characters display commendable characteristics that make them all highly likable.

Bérénice Marlohe glows with exuberant kindness and empathy. Lambert Wilson, expertly portraying that which Americans find both typical and impenetrable of the (particularly aristocratic) French, reveals therein universally-recognizable and enviable grace and integrity. The audience at the Miami Jewish Film Festival howled with laughter as Glenn Close and Frank Langella, playing Brian's parents, masterfully interpreted the Jewish martyr-mother and stubborn father, respectively.

Victor Levin's directorial sensitivity enticed each of these actors to interpret stereotypic portrayals in a loving manner, to great comic and dramatic effect. Levin walks the line perfectly without offense. The characters are not caricatures: they are quintessential and highly endearing and human incorporations of their representative communities.

As the plot unfolds, Brian becomes a study in character development. He learns, on all planes, the value of dedication, sacrifice, and a good underlying moral compass. The story is accessible and compelling. It speaks to serendipity and the extent to which life is a sum of our experiences, most markedly seen in relationships. I found a very resonant message that these relationships are best savored with sensitivity to their context and they always be remembered with sweetness. Ain't that the truth!

We all have seen the Holocaust story told through the eyes of the victims: the protagonists of countless documentaries, biopics, and dramatizations. In Silence's, innovative concept and sublimely sensitive execution breaks the mold of typical victim's perspective in its fresh, provocative, and deeply moving presentation.

The film follows the typical Holocaust story line: early/pre-Nazi normalcy followed by the first anti-Jewish laws, the disruption, the gathering storm, the shock of reality, the gruesome horrors, and the shambles of what is left thereafter. However, in viewing this chronology through the eyes of artists, the film leverages artistry to tell the story: not merely the art of the victims but the filmmaker's own interpretation of time and rhythm, reinforced by rich cinematography, striking visuals, music, and silence.

It is consistently difficult to grasp the sense of time in this film. The beginning, middle, and end are clearly signaled, as they are predictable. Also, the inexorable spiral of the well- documented historical events is inevitable. However, in scene after scene, the sharp cuts and shifts in focus among the characters create a sense of disorientation. This is accentuated in the first phase by halcyon, color-saturated broad vistas breaking to black and white mechanical processes filmed in macro.

The rapidity and unexpectedness of the cuts are echoed in sound, including abrupt and ostensibly bafflingly interruptions of musical performances: one greatly melodious, another heavily rhythmic, both precipitously going silent. The viewer is left breathless with foreboding. Conversely, other performances occur or carry-on under bizarre circumstances; circumstances that demand silence yet from which music emanates, strangely punctuating the absurdity of the situation. The viewer is left before a surrealistic tableau that echoes the absurdity that the callous and senseless barbarity of the Holocaust did in fact occur, and that it was rooted in societies that valued highly and nurtured art, thought, and science.

As is typically the case in this genre, we live the horror through the eyes of the protagonists, in this case the artists. Their artistic cargo creates the gargantuan juxtaposition of sublime beauty with abject immorality. During internment, when the characters' sensitive artistic souls are muffled by the animalistic need to survive, the viewer becomes unbalanced, confused, profoundly moved, and horrified. In one of the later scenes, one of the characters poignantly comments that she is unable to distinguish between what she lived through and what others told her of it. The suggestion is that the sensitive victim was so aghast at the degree of the monstrosity through which she lived as to be unable to comprehend its reality. I share in her disorientation, as I recall the striking sounds and images that I experienced while viewing this impressive and resonant film.

In Silence eloquently provokes us to address that persistent question: how this possibly could have happened in such an advanced society. In contrasting so starkly the secure/insecure, the lushness/spareness, the beauty/depravity, and the music/silence, we are reminded that no society is immune to wholesale debasement. The world must not forget: if it could happen there, it could happen anywhere.