Silence Becomes You

Having previously worked with the director, Stephanie Sinclaire, on a short film adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart", she invited me to compose the soundtrack for her first feature film. Alicia Silverstone ("Preppy Girls of Beverly Hills") plays Violet, while Sienna Guillory ("Eragon," "Resident Evil") plays her sister Grace. They live in a run-down mansion in the middle of nowhere, haunted by memories of their youth and their domineering father (Leigh Lawson). Like a pair of mermaids, they lure a young man to fulfill their desires, but not everything goes as planned. The film has elements of horror, fairy tale, mysticism and romance, and the music moves between these worlds. The two sisters constantly alternate between playful and sinister, and the music needed to do the same. The soundtrack's orchestral elements were recorded at Hear No Evil studios in London.

The interpenetration of Donne and Rossetti's poems with the script for "Silence Becomes You" characterizes intermedial, the creation of a hybrid text where at least two means interpenetrate in the creation of a third. The fusion of media does not happen, however, with the same visibility, as a result of the degrees of interpenetration of different media or languages in the hybridization process. The various degrees of visibility seem to indicate that the medium, as an intermediary element, can merge and be present in the final work with zero visibility (a medium "visibly" absent in the final work, a fusion carried out in the reader's implicit mind), as a mark of water (medium with minimal visibility), such as wallpaper (medium with medium visibility) and foreground (medium with similar visibility). There may also be an asymmetry between the reader and the work. In zero visibility, the reader needs to be a narrative, an implicit, educated, informed reader, because the interpenetration of media is not visible and the fusion will depend on the reader's information, knowledge or readings. At the foreground degree, the viewer or reader will clearly observe or see the interpenetration of different media.

The filmic narrative in "Silence Becomes You" is essentially rhizomatic and the viewer is often led to question the various ramifications in the development of the diegesis. The narrative is inconclusive, the plans are vague, the motivations are not always clear, the path followed is questionable. The film begins with a loud narration of the first line of the poem "Go and Catch a Falling Star" and adds other lines that do not belong to the poem. The poetic voice in Donne's poem asserts that there is no honest woman to be found in the world, and if there was such a woman, while trying to reach her, she would have had the opportunity and time to become dishonest. In the film, dishonesty is first related to the male character and then to Grace, the older sister. The viewer feels that there is a strong feeling of love between the two sisters, and they depend exclusively on each other to survive. They were raised far from any contact with other children or people outside the small family: their father and mother (now deceased), Grace and Violet.

Before Luke's (Joe Anderson) arrival at the mansion, the sisters have a plan that is never explicitly stated, but is understood to be a seduction trap: they plan to lure a young man to the mansion so they have the chance to get pregnant. There should be no other type of involvement with the man, only a physical one. As soon as one of them became pregnant, the stranger would be discarded, and the two sisters would continue with their lives as before. Within this fairytale kingdom, the sisters, under their father's influence, have built a world of their own and practice their powers to the point of exhaustion. Grace, the oldest, most powerful and passionate, is related to fire: her hair is deep red, her powers are great. Violet is related to water. Her sister calls her a mermaid, and when she gives in to Luke's wish, footage of her is shown as going deep into the waters to join Neptune.

Violet, the youngest sister, who sets out in search of the young man, breaks this initial agreement when she falls in love with Luke. However, it seems that he is the perfect man for the plan, because he responds, "Wrong man. I don't do love," when she says, contrary to the plan, that she wants him to fall in love with her. When she leaves the house (the first of Propp's duties) to find a man, the sisters ignore that this is also the beginning of the conflict, because there is a ban (they must not fall in love with the man), but Violet violates the agreement, and in doing so, the sisters' plan appears to be doomed to failure. Luke, the anti-hero, who is brought drunk to the mansion, starts wandering around the room the next morning in an attempt to find out where he is and takes the money that Grace puts inside one of the drawers on purpose, to check his character. Once again, this young man appears to be a villain who fell into the sisters' trap. In relation to Donne's poem, Stephanie Sinclaire seems to have subverted the roles, because in the film Luke is the incarnation of dishonesty, not women, until he becomes Violet's unwitting accomplice. So, the role of the villain in the story is played by Grace. Several transgressions have already occurred: the hero is an anti-hero; the antihero is a villain; the role of the antagonist changes hands; the villain ends up taking on the role of the hero (when Luke unwittingly falls in love with Violet and tries to save her from Grace's evil and powerful influence).

Grace's power goes beyond the limits of her sister's mansion and the relationship they have seems typical of identical twins. Several times throughout the film, Violet suffers the consequences of Grace's power. The first indication that the sisters are united by more than blood comes when Grace, enraged by Violet's ride with Luke, burns the note Violet left saying she will return in twenty minutes, and with the note she burns her fingertip. . Violet in the car, far from the mansion, feels a similar pain in her finger. Later, when Grace seduces Luke while they are having sex, Violet, in town, feels terrible and knows something is wrong. When she finally decides to leave with Luke, her sister takes one of Violet's photos and starts burning it, starting at the bottom edge. Violet feels sick and out of breath in the car. This terrible feeling only stops when Grace, knowing the consequences of her action, throws water over Violet's burning photo. This is also the time when Grace brings Violet back home through her mental powers and convinces Luke to spend a night at the mansion the night he dies. Now, if we as viewers believe that Grace has special magical powers, we will be entering the magical, fantastic and wonderful realm. If we choose to see these events as common and coincidental events, we are being taken by what appears to be unwarranted credulity. We can consider the appearances of the dead father in the same way.

The viewer is made to hesitate every time the father appears. His presence could be a projection of Violet and Grace's minds or a memory from the past, when they remember moments with their father during their childhood. It is also as a woman, in the present moment of the narrative, that Grace "lives" moments as such. The father seems to have risen from the dead to be with his favorite daughter. These appearances of the father and mother (less frequent) and the girls can be explained psychologically, but those involving Grace as a woman with her father cannot. Well, we can say that Grace relives some of her childhood experiences as a woman, but how can we explain the girl, apparently Violet, who takes Luke by the hand and leads him to Violet's room? Startled by the apparition, Luke asks, "You're just a kid. Who takes care of you? And the girl replies: "I take care of myself".

In the end, "Silence Becomes You" tries to be something more poetic, but fails miserably. Technically, the film is a total disaster with a completely split edit, which cuts scenes in half, and the soundtrack that sometimes even seems to have a more childish quality. The photography is extremely basic, immediately highlighting its low budget and the acting is simply hideous. With a precarious script, unexplained passages of time, random scenes, it is a martyrdom to watch this film that looks more like an unsuccessful college experiment. The film is only one hour and twenty minutes long but feels four hours long to anyone lucky enough not to be consumed by absolute boredom.

Silence Becomes You was most likely one of the worst movies that I have seen of all time. The cast did a wonderful job, however the plot was confusing and not very entertaining. The picture and quality of the movie overall was good, however the messy plot, and the confusing events don't make up for the time I lost watching the movie. If the events weren't so scrambled, and more was explained, I feel the movie could have been a hell of a lot more interesting. I watched the movie, sadly, three times, just to understand the little bit of sense in which I made of it, and honestly, the only way I would ever watch this movie again is if I were to get it for free, or if I was locked in a windowless room for the rest of my life with nothing else to do.

If you do not want to be the maddest person in the universe today, I beg of you..DO NOT watch this pathetic movie, seriously!! The director & the producer needs to be shot for this one! I had to literally come here & hope to God someone explained what was it I just watched! And I fought to keep one eye open so I didn't fall asleep on it. My dream probably would have been better! Then when I found out what the movie was about I realized I was better off not knowing! I can't believe someone even put this out on DVD much less a known actress was in it. I guess it's like my neighbor said, Silverstone hadn't made a movie in so long that she must have picked something with lines a 6th grader could memorize so she could pay her water bill. Let me tell all of you just how flimsy & pathetic this movie is, it makes that corny Honeymooners & Cat Woman look GOOD! I usually write the names of the new movies down then come here & read everyone's opinions before renting it. It NEVER fails, when I don't do that I get a piece of cr-p! I want my money back, whaaa sniff-sniff!!!!

Two sisters, Violet (Alicia Silverstone) and Grace (Sienna Guillory), very bounded to each other, live in an old mansion with ghosts of their past. Violet meets Luke (Joe Anderson) in a bar, and brings him to her mansion. Along the days, she seduces him, and they have sex many times as part of a plot with Grace. When Luke decides to leave the house with Violet, Grace tries to avoid, and Luke finds that they are trapped in the place.

This lame film gave me the sensation that a part is missing. I saw it on DVD, but if it was on VHS, I would believe that the tape might have broken and missed the part with the explanation of the plot of Grace and Violet. I am not sure if the screenplay is awful, or the characters are badly developed or both, but I was not able to understand the confuse story. The soundtrack in many parts is annoying, Alicia Silverstone is not sexy in the sex scenes, therefore nothing but the beautiful cinematography works in this awful direction. I would not recommend this flick even in a rainy and boring Saturday afternoon in Rio de Janeiro. My vote is two.

Title (Brazil): "Vítima da Sedução" ("Victim of the Seduction")

same recipes. interesting atmosphere. and only sin is the too large ambition of director to present more than it is reasonable in this case. result - a not coherent story. seductive images and a thin plot. the atmosphere seems more important than story. every image, every reference is pillar for a dark portrait who has not beginning or end. and that is the basic problem because the entire work is almost a web without spider. the acting is prisoner of plot. and the plot is confuse and chaotic. short, a nice film and for the fans of genre a good oasis. but it is not enough. maybe, for possibilities of subject. and for actors who deserve better roles and opportunities to do a work with reasonable result.