MANY things are inflammable in Felix Inala’s Quiet; many things too palpable – stagger,
gusto and scourge. As the curtains fall, Skull cringes with sensory implosions;
yet, the many things compensate, for Mind is imbued by them, and, then – QUIET.
The moral mind is not deceived by Inala’s title. That story tag is never merely
an aesthetic decimal, but the very equation, an exponential consequence of a
9-minute sequence; and it is not the cast that must embody it, but the
audience!
A debutant filmmaker hailed as the “Founder
of Vision Pictures”, teeming with idealistic convictions, has both stirred a
match against abduction and remained withdrawn. A bracing dose of horror
delivers his message, and he didn’t have to co-opt the lofty menace of strange lands – for instance, protestant Moroccan
bandits or a captured UN peacekeeper in Darfur. No. Inala’s choice is not lofty,
but it is candid and familiar: an unknown street. In fact, it is about an
unknown girl who will face an unknown fate in the clutch of an unknown
sociopath in an unknown place at an unknown time.
However, it is the genuineness of the unknown that suppurates the scenes, the unknown that wails in the universal truth which Ban Ki-moon considers applicable to all countries, cultures and communities – that "violence against women is never acceptable, never excusable and never tolerable". At this point, Quiet attains a compelling thematic essence, raised to a noble scale.
In his trademark act-trumps-talk narrative mode, Inala keeps a symbolic cast of characters off-cynosure. But his most astute, and distressing, move is to pair one conqueror of fear, a newly abducted girl of trenchant hope, with a scapegoat outcome – a ransom for bravery in the sordid face of disgrace. For the average individual, the search for a specific motif – albeit later indicated – is, thus, rendered speculative: is it a concession for gender vulnerability, or a dissenting account? Is it about the power of – or need for – feminine determinism, or the futility of it? Is this story postulating something, or discarding the postulated? Does it have an opinion about the issue it dramatizes, or is it in search of one?
Not necessarily Inala himself – we
do not know enough of him, compositionally dissected – but such creatives exist
in numbers, whose intentions are convoluted. Despite the absence of tangible
poetic justice, one is compelled to concede, paradoxically, a basic, tragic conviction
to the enabling paradox of a society’s immoral reality – senile witnesses of
abduction – a conviction in the belief of the inviolability of evil.
If this short film is bent on “evoking
pity and fear”, as is remindful of the Aristotelian tragedy (which must imitate
an action, complete and of serious magnitude); it has succeeded, in spite of limp
camera angles and severe scenic incongruities. If this is the intended mainstay
of a nascent Inalatude – to, without dishonesty, recollect the bitter truths
of an insensitive criminal culture – we are yet to witness another more contemporary wave from the tides of
the Judith Audus and Chris Odehs!
Watch Quiet here.
Incisive review, Oyin. Weldone
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ReplyDeleteYou know to be very honest I do not understand all the terms used in this review, but the message is clear. As it started it seemed as though I was in play. Splendid review oyin, simply remarkable
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