Decoding silence in love via Shape of Water, Mukkabaaz, Phantom Thread

Mute heroines in Shape of Water and Mukkabaaz lend a delicious heft to both the movies

Three recent movies made me realise that silence can be a double-edged sword when employed in a blooming romantic relationship. Anurag Kashyap’s Mukkabaaz has debutant actress Zoya Hussain as the mute but feisty Sunaina who falls for the eponymous boxer, Shravan Singh (in a career-defining role by Vineet Kumar Singh). Props to Kashyap for undressing the idea of a relationship between a mute person and her able-bodied beau via text messages that pop up on the big screen and a mother who enunciates each of her muted thought.
 
I know it’s still early in the year but Hussain’s luminous facial expressions to get her point across make her a foregone conclusion for all debut actor awards next year. The movie also has Kashyap returning to his Gulaal roots where the intoxicating smell of the hinterland mud wafts from each dialogue uttered by even a side character. Singh’s cri de coeur to his ever nagging father about him not having a regular job and hankering after a career in boxing even at a supposedly ripe age of 29 is one of the best scenes in Hindi cinema’s recent past.
 
However, the movie’s most moving moments involve silence, like the scene where Singh is accused of taking Hussain for granted after marriage and tries to make up for it by using sign language to indicate his love for her. Kashyap is an intelligent director who knows how to tell his audience that limerence evaporates in no time and that communication is the key and that Singh is being an absolute jerk for not investing enough time in understanding his wife.
 
Silence is even more pronounced in Guillermo Del Toro’s Cold War-era sci-fi drama, The Shape of Water, which won the Oscar for best picture. Sally Hawkins is the mute waif working as a janitor at a Cold War facility in Baltimore who makes an instant connection with a near mythical river monster that the covert operation chief (Michael Shannon) ferrets from South American waters.
 

A scene from The Shape of Water

Del Toro sets up his lovely internal conceit with the cribbing of Hawkins’ colleague, the motor mouthed Octavia Spencer who says that her good-for-nothing boyfriend doesn’t even utter a thank you for her tireless service towards him all day, all night. Cut to the next frame where the heroine starts teaching her object of desire what an egg is and what it means to dance to music reminiscent of a Fred Astaire movie. These scenes are eerily similar to the 2016 release, Arrival, where Amy Adams’ character, a linguistics boffin, teaches sign language to Cthulhu-like creatures.
 
There’s an evocative scene where the heroine tells her homosexual elderly friend (an avuncular Richard Jenkins) that she waited all her life to be with someone who wouldn’t look at her lack of speaking ability as an impediment to a fruitful relationship. This is probably why I was chuffed to see The Shape of Water winning over Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. After running out of steam as a novel plot, the Martin McDonagh movie trods along as though like a patchwork quilt where brilliant performances, suitably rewarded at the Oscars, fail to redeem an uneven screenplay.
 
But, apologies for that digression.
 
Daniel Day-Lewis as a celebrated 1950s’ fashion designer, who is famously single in Paul Thomas Anderson’s devilishly delightful Phantom Thread, is another character I watched recently who craves for silence in the most unromantic way possible.
 
After consummating his relationship with an ingénue like Vicky Krieps, who also doubles up as his muse and model, the next morning he excoriates her for taking up his creative space.
 
Something as innocuous as her buttering her toast makes him lose his cool. “It’s like you just rode a horse across the room!” is his inimitable way of telling her to stay away from him when he’s working.
 
The movie famously ends in silence, which lasts a good 10 minutes, when the heroine makes a toxic mushroom omelette and our talented designer is more than amenable to wolf it down as his only stab at penance.
 
I used to be on the fence about silence filling up the teething gaps in a relationship but these movies show that actions coupled with silence can be far more voluble than a string of exquisitely uttered sentences.
 
jagannath.jamma@bsmail.in
Twitter: @jagan520