Venice 2024: Quiet Life Review

This will be one of many reviews during this year’s Venice Film Festival, to keep up with our latest coverage, click here.

Greek director Alexandros Avranas splashed in international festivals in 2013, winning the Silver Lion for best directing at the Bienalle di Venezia for Miss Violence. In 2015, he produced his sophomore film, his English debut, Dark Crimes, starring Jim Carrey. The film had a distribution problem, having a limited theatrical release in 2018 and receiving harsh negative reviews. In this year’s Bienalle, he is back with Quiet Life – a French-German-Swedish-Estonian-Greek-Finnish co-production. The film is part of the Orrizonti section competition.

Quiet Life tells the story of a Russian family escaping the government’s oppression and following that, the result of their asylum application. When they get rejected for not having enough evidence of political chase, Katja (Pashutina), the youngest daughter, collapses and enters a coma, diagnosed with child resignation syndrome. As she gets to a reference hospital for those cases, Sergei (Dobrygin), her father, pressures Alina (Lamp), his oldest daughter, to testify about his murder attempt.

In relatively quick fashion, Avranas sets his narrative in three threads fluctuating throughout. The family asylum application. Katja’s coma, the potential danger of the after-effects of the institution’s treatment, and the statement that Alina must rehearse to lie. The plots surround the tension of getting a deportation order to Russia. Avranas thrives in creating urgency in those character’s situations. They have no residence; the family is falling apart, and if they return home, death is inevitable. The possibility of death drives the characters and the acting. The family remain sober, rigid, and willing to follow all the rules that they need to get asylum status.

Tonally, the director clashes with his proposition by approaching the hospital as a satirical segment of his film. It is a vile place that distances refugee families and their children. A nonsensical ambient that obligates the parents to go into smile therapy to see their children and not affect them. It does not work as a whole, as his other segments are brutal moments of surveillance. When they are in the hospital, it is reminiscent of the approach of writer/director Jessica Hausner in her 2023 film Club Zero, a sanitized form of analyzing the absurdities of society. However, in both cases, does not hit the emotional points they look to achieve.

Despite its noble intentions, the film aims to shed light on the experiences of millions of children. The result is merely a shallow film built around a worthy idea. Its realism and absurdity clash as it lacks the identity to carry out what it is trying to transmit emotionally and visually.

In the end, Quiet Life ends on an indifferent note. The film has plenty of fascinating ideas that simply feel flat because the director seems unsure of what he wants to show on screen.

still courtesy of Les Films du Worso

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Pedro Lima

Brazilian film writer. He is also a producer and executive producer for Zariah Filmes. Member of the International Film Society Critics Association (IFSCA), International Documentary Association (IDA), and Gotham and Media Film Institute.