IN A TENSE moment midway through Edward Berger’s recent movie “Conclave,” a pulpy thriller about the process of selecting a new pope, Isabella Rossellini, playing a nun named Sister Agnes, enters a room full of cardinals from around the world. A series of uncovered secrets and shifting alliances have turned this initially serene council into a rat’s nest of backstabbing, grandstanding, explaining, interrupting men. After asking permission to speak, Sister Agnes discreetly delivers a piece of information that will upend the papal election and expose some of the most powerful figures in the Roman Catholic Church to public, career-ending humiliation. Her short speech concluded, she bobs at the waist ever so slightly, giving a tiny curtsy whose performance of feminine deference is a put-down in itself. For the rest of the film, Sister Agnes never says another word.
Her sly protest recalls another time when a quietly rebellious woman confounded a council of would-be holy men: Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1928 classic “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” long considered one of the towering performances of cinema history. Shot almost entirely in tight close-up, Falconetti’s Joan is doubly mute: first, of course, because the film itself is silent but, more pointedly, because the sparse script, based on records of Joan’s 1431 trial, puts nearly all the words in the mouths of her captors. As her male inquisitors grill her about the angelic visions that she claims have told her to dress in men’s clothing and lead the French army into battle, it’s Joan’s refusal to answer or even acknowledge their questions that most enrages them. When one questioner quizzes her about the length of the Archangel Michael’s hair, Joan’s wry response — “Why would he have cut it?” — is a forerunner of Sister Agnes’s ironic bob: a gesture of malicious compliance that serves to expose the hypocrisy of her inquisitors.
For much of film history, women spoke less than men simply because their characters were seldom the story’s focus. The “strong, silent type” of westerns and detective stories was made strong by his silence, while female characters were typically weakened by theirs. When women in classic Hollywood films stepped outside the role of helpmeet, it was to personify the so-called mouthy dame (a type that, at its best, includes Barbara Stanwyck’s Sugarpuss O’Shea in 1941’s “Ball of Fire” and Bette Davis’s Margo Channing in 1950’s “All About Eve”). But however sparkling, brash or bitchy their banter, for decades dialogue written for female characters — often by male screenwriters — existed mainly to establish the fact that a woman was, for some reason, talking.
“Women Talking,” the 2022 film by the writer-director Sarah Polley, won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay, a category befitting both its title and its subject: A movie about a Mennonite community of horrifically abused women claiming the right to speak, whose every frame overflows with expressive, persuasive, angry and anguished language, was recognized specifically for its words. That acknowledgment provided some catharsis in the wake of countless #MeToo scandals. But in the years since, along with a spate of acclaimed movies about women finding their voices (2022’s “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; last year’s “Poor Things” and “Barbie”), a new space has opened up onscreen for women pointedly not talking. Several films released this year — including Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” Erica Tremblay’s “Fancy Dance” and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” — have featured performances by female protagonists whose silence is neither a mark of trauma nor a state of oppression to be overcome but a deliberate strategy, whether for the purposes of introspection, self-preservation or self-discovery.
RONA, THE RECOVERING alcoholic played by Saoirse Ronan in “The Outrun,” speaks little because she is, by choice, completely alone, having exiled herself to a remote island off the coast of Scotland to live out her first raw winter of sobriety. For “Fancy Dance”’s Jax, an Indigenous woman played by Lily Gladstone who’s searching for her missing sister on the Seneca-Cayuga reservation where they both live, being taciturn is more of a character trait, exacerbated by the stress of daily life as a lonely single lesbian on the fringes of an economically depressed community. For Bailey, the 12-year-old heroine of “Bird” (played by the newcomer Nykiya Adams), keeping quiet is a survival method; in order to navigate a life spent between two chaotic households in a council development outside of London, she must stay observant, noncommittal and slow to trust.
To carry a movie as a near-silent lead presents both a challenge and an opportunity for an actor. Ronan gives what may be the performance of her career as the self-destructive Rona, a former biology student whose passion for the natural world announces itself in an incongruously chatty voice-over. But what lifts the movie from a well-crafted portrait to a lyrical work of art is the expressiveness that Ronan brings to her character’s silence, which can mean anything from truculent rebellion to white-knuckled discomfort to ecstatic communion with the surrounding landscape. When, near the end of the film, she shares a moment of vocal but wordless communication with one of the island’s gray seals, there’s no voice-over needed to establish that Rona is just learning to speak the language she was always meant to know.
Gladstone has come to specialize in playing close-to-the-vest types, women who can be secretive and watchful but are hardly stoic or repressed. (Just look at the emotional expressiveness of her Mollie Burkhart in 2023’s “Killers of the Flower Moon”: weeping openly by her mother’s deathbed, screaming in anguish when she learns the truth about her sister’s murder, making out passionately with her husband-to-be.) Gladstone’s characters in “Certain Women” (2016), “The Unknown Country” (2022) and now “Fancy Dance” are similarly attuned to the emotional states of others and quick to suss out hidden motivations. They deploy silence not as a form of emotional self-defense but because remaining open to the experiences of those they encounter is a form of hope.
For Bailey in “Bird,” hope is harder to come by. A mixed-race girl growing up in a housing project, she exists in a world of deafening sound, waking up each morning to her immature father (Barry Keoghan) blasting club music amid the screaming arguments of neighbors, but she survives the cacophony in part by refusing to join it. She displays her anger and sense of abandonment via acts of teenage rebellion — chopping off her hair, adopting raccoon-style black eye makeup — while her longing for connection and beauty finds an outlet in the films that she creates on her phone and projects on the graffiti-covered walls of her room.
There’s a vast temporal, aesthetic and experiential distance that separates Falconetti’s devout, despairing Joan of Arc from the slouchy preteen rebel that Adams plays in “Bird.” But both young women share something that has, until recently, been rare: They are given a place to hold the viewer’s attention, not despite but because of their refusal to speak. Too many discussions of female speech in Hollywood begin and end with the Bechdel test — a metric first proposed in 1985 by a character in Alison Bechdel’s comic series “Dykes to Watch Out For,” in which the character Ginger insists that she’ll only watch movies containing at least two women who speak to each other about something other than a man. (The punchline is that she hasn’t seen a movie since “Alien,” released six years earlier.) These days, a pair of women talking about anything but men is no longer such a rarity onscreen. But finally, it seems, women are coming to occupy the center of their own stories, even in the absence of verbal self-disclosure. Audiences are being asked to listen not just to what women have to say but to the complexity of the conversations they may be having only with themselves.
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