40
SUSAN SONTAG
his pilgrim's progress toward death, Hester's blindness is another, trans–
posed form of silence. In
Duet for Cannibals,
the catalytic member of
the quartet, Francesca, refuses to speak. And the Francesca figure re–
appears in
Brother Carl,
doubled: as the almost mute Carl and as
the autistic child. Looking back now, I recognize in Martin a new ver–
sion of the psychological fascist in
Duet for Cannibals.
Martin is a
Bauer past his prime; a Bauer who has already wreaked the maximum
amount of damage; a Bauer who, in a state of exhaustion, revulsion,
and weary cynicism, has lost his appetite for playing games and even
hopes to behave decently.
Out of the script for
Duet for Cannibals,
which was written in
English, I chose to make a Swedish-language film. I had engaged three
extremely talented Swedish actors, who all spoke English fluently. But
I knew they would not have the same freedom or expressiveness if they
acted their roles in English. No actor, however talented, retains his or
her full range in a second language. (For the fourth member of the
quartet, the Italian actress Adriana Asti, the question was irrelevant;
since she spoke neither English nor Swedish, she would in either case
still have had to learn her relatively few lines phonetically.) So the
script was translated into Swedish, which did wonders for my hitherto
lazy progress in learning Swedish. English remained the language of
the set - the language of all discussions with the crew and the actors
(except for Adriana Asti) - but the actors spoke Swedish when they
were before the camera.
With
Brother Carl,
I started with the same elements: Swedish
actors who, along with Genevieve Page, spoke fair to excellent English;
and Laurent Terzieff, who spoke neither English nor Swedish and would,
whatever my decision, have to learn his part phonetically, as Adriana
Asti had done in
Duet for Cannibals.
This time, I did not have the
script translated into Swedish. I decided to exploit the very peculiarity
of my situation - an American director, working with a largely bi–
lingual cast, in a country in which English is the official second lan–
guage. By asking the actors to perform in English, I knew that I was
abridging their range and diminishing their comfort. But I wanted
them to work from within that very handicap. Whereas in
Duet for
Cannibals
I had simply aimed at getting "good" (i.e., professional,
subtle) performances out of the actors, I asked something less traditional
from the actors in
Brother Carl.
I wanted to incorporate as a
formal
element in the film the very difficulties they would have sometimes in
speaking English - the play of accents, their hesitations, misplaced
rhythms, stiffnesses.
The material of
Brother Carl
(unlike
Duet for Cannibals)
seemed
well suited to this kind of experiment, since the plot itself turned on
