The very small band of dissenters who failed to get on board with Joshua Oppenheimer's ecstatically received The Act of Killing tended to worry about an uncomfortable hint of complicity between film-maker and subject.
Their argument was that, yes, inviting former Indonesian torturers to act out their crimes in the style of genre cinema helped draw out hidden truths. But were we not being invited to revel in the sheer weirdness of the resulting presentations?
Oppenheimer's essential follow-up, by attaching itself to a victim, repels any such suspicions. The Look of Silence is not quite so odd a film as The Act of Killing, but it is every bit as moving and troubling. The director accompanies Adi, a brave young optician, as he goes among the Indonesian people who detained, tortured and ultimately killed his brother.
Oppenheimer retains his eye for a singular image. The sight of Adi discussing atrocities with former government hoodlums – tasked with annihilating "communists" following the 1965 coup – while they wear the old-school optometrist testing apparatus is one that stays in the brain (not least because roles have been benevolently reversed). Cutting to Adi's home where, as insects chirrup, his mother cares for her apparently centenarian husband, The Look of Silence takes on the quality of an Apichatpong Weerasethakul film.
Such aesthetics are, however, secondary to content. A still man of apparently endless patience, Adi talks to senior officials, the ground-level grunts and an uncle who acted as captor. Again and again, we encounter a wilful reluctance to engage in any meaningful way with the past. One particularly resistant interviewee dismisses any attempt to analyse his atrocities as “politics”.
Our hero doesn't appear to be asking for an apology. He seems merely to want an acknowledgment of undeniable truths. We already knew about the human appetite for evil. The Look of Silence addresses something more slippery and banal: our endless capacity for evasion.
Not to be missed.
