Move over Yorgos Lanthimos. Compatriot Alexandros Avranas also has a bleak few things to say about the infinite downside of the human experience in this frosty drama set within the maze of Swedish bureaucracy in 2018.
The Greek weird wave man delivered a tar-black portrait of family life in 2013’s Miss Violence, and his latest is an equally poor advert for parenthood. Here, he muscles in on Roy Andersson’s offbeat terrain to deliver a chilly allegory that follows an asylum-seeking Russian family as it navigates unsmiling Swedish bureaucracy.
Dissident teacher Sergei (Grigory Dobrygin, A Most Wanted Man) has fled Russia after a brutal attack from the security services, taking his wife Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova, the girlfriend in Good Bye, Lenin!) and their two young daughters, Alina (Naomi Lamp) and Katja (Miroslava Pashutina), to the relative sanctuary of Sweden.
But it’s fair to say that Avranas is not one of life’s optimists, and his depiction of what the family has to deal with would give Kafka a headache. Subjected to interrogation, their claims to asylum picked apart. For reasons never made clear, Sergei’s professional status counts against them here; perhaps he just does not match the preconception of what a political refugee should look like, despite the vivid scar he flaunts in a desperate attempt to be believed.
This depiction of bureaucracy would Kafka a headache
But, confusingly, Quiet Life ceases to be about the trauma of the parents – at least, not that trauma. Instead, its vision of uncaring bureaucracy gives way to something even more painful, as first Katja and then Alina slip into unexplained comas.
Avranas has taken real-life inspiration from ‘Child Resignation Syndrome’ here, a phenomenon reported in thousands of children, often from war zones and experiencing extreme upheaval. He amps up the nightmarishness by depicting a health system almost sci-fi in its sterility. Doctors limit the time Sergei and Naomi can spend at their daughters’ bedsides and force them to undergo a kind of smiling therapy – scenes that yield some much-needed dry humour.
Like its near-namesake A Quiet Place, Quiet Life plays effectively on that deep seated parental fear: of not being able to protect your children or, worse, infecting them with your anxiety and uncertainty. And while the Greek filmmaker loses some traction on his film’s satirical edges, he replaces it with something heartfelt and humane. There’s method in the weirdness.
Quiet Life premiered at the Venice Film Festival.