Beyond Silence

I see Lara’s home as the place where she feels she can’t develop into a complete person. This is because she is constantly tending to her parents’ needs over her own. She gives so much of her time and her energy to them that there is little left to do things for herself. Clearly, she and her parents had a loving relationship, but her parents depend on her a lot. Since they depend on her, it almost seemed like she was parenting them. At the same time, her parents were pretty protective of her. So while she is at home, she is caught in this duty of taking care of her parents, while also being sheltered by them. However, once she goes to Berlin, she is easily able to focus on her needs and decide what she really wants. She builds a relationship outside of the family when she meets Tom. Before, it seemed like her life was centered on her family, and the film didn’t really show her spending time with friends.

I think that if Lara were a male, things would have been different in this film. I think that the relationship she had with her parents would not have been the same, especially with her father. Since the parents deaf, they rely on her completely to help them. This is clear in the film by the way Lara had to speak for her parents at the bank, and in other public places. She is tied to her parents and their house until she becomes an adult. When she turns 18 (the typical age to go to college), it seemed that her father was really upset not only that she was going to learn music with his sister, but that she was leaving home. As a female, Lara was under more pressure to remain at home and help her parents, than she might have been as a male. Maybe if she had been a man, her parents would not have expected her to do so much for them. They might have allowed her more freedom to do what she wanted, instead of trying to control her (as her father often did). Her parents might have understood the need for a son to leave the house and provincial life more than they did for their daughter. 

Music is a very important theme in this film. Even though the film shows how music is something that is physically heard, it also shows how it can be more of a feeling (internal) than a sound. A good example of this is when Lara visits Tom at the school he teaches at. The children in the class are deaf, yet when they play the game in which they put their ears to the floor, they all sense the music, and Lara doesn’t. Another scene I thought showed internal music was when Lara spoke to her aunt about the pieces she was planning on playing for her audition. Her aunt told her that she was choosing music that was too sad, and that happier tunes would be better. Lara responds by saying that the music she hears on the surface is not all that she hears. She says that she hears something hopeful in this music on a deeper, internal level. This deeper level involves how she perceives the music emotionally, rather than how she physically hears it.