Cicadas chirp, the whispered breeze broods, a cosmic ocean brews; all conspire a deafening crescendo that deadens in an instant. Silence. And in this silence there are no martyrs, just men of God on a mission that no God can prepare them for. While one God is willing, I fear the flock may be deaf to his calls. Scarce as those fluent in the language of cinema seem to have made themselves, I humbly submit to interpret the gospel of Martin Scorsese.
Shrouded in mist, two severed heads on a slab, soulless; a faceless guard assures they remain unable to cross over whole. Even under the foot of the Tokugawa Shogunate, this is Scorsese country, and rather than acclimate us to its inclemency, he baptizes us in the hell springs of its pitiless terrain. Scalding doom and otherworldly endurance counteract, dispelling each-others' mythos in a simmering Old Testament tableau. So intent on the suffocation of souls, the unsettled steam never fully dissipates, manifesting a skulking ghost that plagues the picture to its penultimate image.
With martyrdom a narrative nexus that nudges men of faith down their narrow path, the master imagines slivers of everything and conducts accordingly. Lensing 2.35:1, Patron Saint of Cinematography Rodrigo Prieto makes short work of constraining a ship to a slipstream between overbearing sea and cloud cover, the consonance of missionary footsteps to a single black key on an inverted stone claviature, and a chaperone's ingress to an enclave of claustrophobia. All are centrally magnetized to calibrate our compass. A focus, once parsed by hiking staffs and hulking pikes, piercing the expanse to drape of boiled flesh, is instantaneously localized, locked on a screen legend's precipitous frame in prolonged collapse. A succession of true master shots that one can only assume will find the film at its most gruesome and contemplative. Assume away.
While for a breath, familiarity allows for reprieve, as the despotism of the East is disclosed to a duo of seemingly stock "White Savior" characters, we can be sure these sinfully ill-prepared stalwarts of the Hollywood historical drama (ostensibly our stand-ins) are unlikely to be spared. The serenely subdued lighting scheme coheres a compositional simplicity and naïveté a clash with the Kurosawa-esque cold-open in every respect. Two years and a sea separate the sorrowful from the soulful, the world weary from the woefully vulnerable; their incompatible milieu married by a sheet of parchment. The prestigious insert of spectacles bespeaks a crusading sovereign's shortsightedness. And where form is content, world cinema will finally have its way with Hollywood.
Stowaway leitmotif hide in plain sight. A slender support beam dead-center an angular two-shot, buttresses each side of the corresponding close-ups which are cropped just below black priest collars: plinths supporting severed heads. Have we already witnessed the fate of these guileless crusaders? Is such suffering the call of predestination? Is the blood of martyrs truly the seed of the church? Does the circular skylight haloing the piously decisive Father Rodrigues denote divinity? Disciplined by an aesthetic dogma that sculpts each shot to serve a multitude of masters, the orthodoxy astonishes. Ecclesial symbols regress, but the same questions are posed of nature.
Embarking on the unknown, the scope expands exponentially whilst our subjectively shared view concurrently conspires to diminish vertically. When our envoy Kichijiro is uncovered in his cowering stupor, the Archbishop of Art Direction Dante Ferretti, has cobbled him a hostage of his own hovel. Hidden beneath a tavern staircase, with no upright angle to speak of; no words are necessary, his mere presence is affixed an affront. When the innards of a cave imprison our periphery to the eye sockets of a massive skull, the irony in a convoy of missionaries who pray that no one is watching, can not be lost. We are uniquely positioned as their potential persecutor and silent savior: the God whose asylum they seek.
No sooner will the search for shelter transform to sanctuary, than survival supersedes, presenting the pressing prospect of self entombment. Buried below the rough-hewn hull of a hut, Prieto plants Father Rodrigues aslant so that the thinnest slat of light between floorboards remains perfectly perpendicular. The angle itself is skeleton key to the film's theology. The Father's impassioned strain to see what's on the other side and in this case above him, to seek light though a solid object, underscores the indelible image. Under the mocking magnification of his own self-imposed and subliminally symbolized myopia, the young Jesuit is first tested. His faithful decision, an act of trust, declares openly the core of his character and seals his fate not to the heavens but to that of his fellow man.
When a penitent Kichijiro asks of his potential redeemer, "Where is the place for a weak man in a world such as this?", he is not asking a silent God but a man who acts on faith. A man who seems to know. That man sees his vocation clearly, but not the world. Do we see either? Are we blind to both? Recall the mise-en-scène: the crest of a cliff, the Disciple bowed at the foot of the Father. But the hallowed mountain setting elicits a cursed confession no sermon can possibly upstage. The next time the pair meet (whether by chance, fate, or in some fever-dream of betrayal) the Father literally plummets from a peak, unceremoniously crashing to the floor of a valley at the foot of the Disciple. In their last time alone together, they are knelt at the same tatami, face to face. No station separates them; they are finally equals, brothers, and delicately framed as such. When the long lost Father Ferreira adjures, "Pray, but do so with your eyes open." he is secretly addressing us. We are in a cinematic prayer.
It is lore that an adolescent Martin Scorsese had aspirations of Priesthood. At some point he stepped from that path to forge his own, and in doing so, bestowed on humanity a blessing. To teach us how to pray with our eyes open. Silence is his hand-crafted rosary. A benediction that reaffirms the soul of man, restores our withering senses and reestablishes nature as sacrosanct. It also assuredly reasserts the dominion of the Director in Cinema. Immaculate compositions etched from the awe of exploration, excavating the ego under its own ever-diminishing light; an unconventionally uncontaminated score, exalting vocation as a sound only you can hear.
Cicadas chirp, the whispered breeze broods, a cosmic ocean brews; learn to listen. Bear witness to cinema as a calling. Shot for shot, cut for cut, the providence of craft nonpareil. Zen culls the colossus. An epic testament to the true challenge of faith. A faith, not only in God, but in anything, including the auteur’s own artistic vision. Art, of and about the eternal within the internal. A gift you may have to safeguard from others but also from yourself. A sound you may be made to suffer with, in silence. -d
