Words, Words, Words

There's poignancy in silence. This is not meant to be an excuse for my lack of postings in the last several days, but it is something that I have been thinking about a lot recently. It started about a week ago when I saw a French film called "Mademoiselle Chambon." I read a review of the movie in The Daily News that intrigued me. The review said that although the film was, bien sur, a romantic triangle, it did not have the heavy dose of 'sex and cigarettes' that one normally goes to French cinema to see. I know that even the French are not allowed to smoke at bars anymore, but some cinematic traditions are sacred. Just because they can't smoke in bed afterwards, doesn't mean they should dispense with the act itself. As it turns out, the film includes tremendous passion and even some sex, but the sex is almost an afterthought and, perhaps in a first for French cinema, arguably expendable.

The story of the film is simple: a working class, married father falls in love with his son's school teacher. She is single, lives alone and is also an accomplished classical violinist. That is pretty much it, except that the two main characters portray such depth of agony and emotion with so few words that the film is practically a silent movie. When they do talk to one another, they treat words as if they are precious and extremely powerful. You can imagine then, that a lot goes unsaid, but everything registers on the faces of the actors. You might feel cheated at the end, if what you like in a movie is confrontation and resolution. Everything doesn't tie up into a neat little package punctuated by a lot of "I love yous." But that's what we have Disney, or rather Pixar, for. Thank God I can still go to the Lincoln Plaza Cinema on the West side and leave feeling totally up in the air.

Shortly after I saw this film, I learned that my father has an illness in which he is slowly losing his ability to recall words and complete sentences. Our family has known that he is suffering with loss of language ability for quite some time. We are all heartbroken; particularly for someone as articulate and intellectually lively as my father this is a devastating diagnosis.

But I have just as strong a belief in the power of non-verbal communication as I do in the power of words. A person can express a lot with just a turning away of the head. If Mademoiselle Chambon gives its audience anything it's that we should value words as a gift and use them a lot more sparingly. We take them way too much for granted as it is.