‘Beyond Silence’ Is Touching Look at Family

Caroline Link’s highly accomplished and engrossing Oscar-nominated German film “Beyond Silence” has the look of an idyll. An attractive couple, Martin and Kai Bischoff (Howie Seago, Emmanuelle Laborit), live with their beautiful 8-year-old daughter (Tatjana Trieb) in a lovely 19th century farmhouse in the Bavarian countryside. When it snows the place is as inviting as an old-fashioned Christmas card.

The Bischoffs are in fact a happy, deeply loving family but one with special challenges: The parents are deaf-mutes who communicate with each other and their daughter through sign language.

“What would we do without you?” asks Martin rhetorically, after Lara has interpreted for her parents at the local bank. That question becomes the film’s point, for as Lara matures she will face a very real struggle to assert her independence from parents who have relied upon her so strongly. Already Lara is falling behind in her reading and writing skills because of their often unwitting demands.

Such responsibilities have matured Lara well beyond her 8 years, and as an interpreter she has learned to become an amusingly clever diplomat, tailoring her parents’ questions and the replies to them in what she considers the family’s best interests.

Lara’s heroine is her father’s elegant older sister Clarissa (Sibylle Canonica), a clarinetist who encourages her to follow in her footsteps. This is an immediate source of tension because Martin has an understandably deep-seated resentment toward his parents, who have never learned to sign, and a certain jealousy of Clarissa. Martin’s enduring sense of isolation reveals Germany’s reluctance to endorse sign language, insisting that it inhibits the deaf from learning to speak and that they are better off reading lips, an attitude that is by and large considered outdated in the U.S.

As the film moves forward 10 years we discover that Lara (now played by Sylvie Testud), whose special responsibilities to her parents have continued to foster her self-assertiveness, is flowering into a first-rate clarinetist. She now has a younger sister to help interpret for their parents, and she has become determined to take up her aunt’s offer to come to Berlin to prepare for the exams that will gain her entry into the conservatory there. Fate then pulls a cruel trick, making Lara’s difficulties in leaving home infinitely tougher.

Link and her co-writer, Beth Serlin, illuminate Lara’s entire world beautifully, making clear very realistically that her parents’ deafness is hardly the only challenge Lara will have to face, starting with the fact that her aunt, as loving as she is, would like her to be the daughter she never had and would like her to excel musically but not to better her. (If Martin’s austere, autocratic father has in effect rejected him, he has also made it clear to his daughter that she has not lived up to his expectations as a musician.)

However, Lara is lucky in meeting a warm, caring young man, Tom (Hansa Czypionka), who is making a career in teaching deaf children, as his own father is deaf. Unlike most young lovers, Lara and Tom have recourse to another language should ever words fail them. Also supportive is her uncle (Matthias Habich), increasingly estranged from the unhappy Clarissa.

With its deft interplay of sound and silence, “Beyond Silence” is a rich, handsome film of passion, energy and joy as well as pain, and as any of us who have had a parent with a serious hearing loss can tell you, it rings all too true in its depiction of the ways in which deafness can exacerbate the often already difficult communication between parent and child. Link assembled a most affecting cast.

* MPAA rating: PG-13, for a scene of sexuality. Times guidelines: The film has one brief scene of lovemaking.

‘Beyond Silence’

Sylvie Testud: Lara

Tatjana Trieb: Lara as a child

Howie Seago: Martin

Emmanuelle Laborit: Kai

Sibylle Canonica: Clarissa

Matthias Habich: Gregor

Hansa Czypionka: Tom

A Miramax Films and Buena Vista International presentation of of a production of Claussen/Wobke Films Productions and Roxy Film-Luggi Waldleitner. Director Caroline Link. Producers Thomas Wobke, Jacob Claussen and Luggi Waldleitner. Screenplay by Link and Beth Serlin. Cinematographer Gernot Roll. Editor Patricia Rommel. Costumes Katharina von Martius. Music Niki Reiser. Production designer Susann Bieling. In German and German sign language, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes.

* At selected theaters.