Beyond Silence (Jenseits der Stille) is a 1996 film from Germany directed by Caroline Link.
Lara is a young girl who is the child of deaf parents, but herself has normal hearing. She often finds herself translating for her parents, Martin and Kai, when Martin and Kai have to interact with hearing people. Martin, as it happens, is from a family of musicians, and his sister Clarissa is a professional clarinetist. Martin felt alienated from his hearing family when he was growing up, and he still has an uncomfortable relationship with them.
So it's awkward when Clarissa gives her niece a clarinet. Lara shows talent with the clarinet and her music teacher encourages her, but Martin is indifferent. Cut forward a few years and Lara is now 18, and played by Sylvie Testud in her first starring role. Clarissa, who has continued to encourage Lara's musical education, gets her a place at a Berlin conservatory. Martin is furious, and a major family rupture ensues.
Compare French film La Famille Bélier and its American remake CODA, which have a similar plot.
Tropes:
- Age Cut: Lara, who is about eight, is playing clarinet onstage at her school. The camera pans to the Lens Flare of a spotlight, then pans back to Lara, now 18 years old and played by Sylvie Testud.
- Coming of Age Story: The protagonist is a young girl who ages from 8 to 18, who asserts her independence from her overly controlling father and starts out on a life of her own with music school. (And towards the end she's deflowered by her boyfriend, a teacher at a school for the deaf.)
- Flashback: A flashback shows the moment where Martin's alienation from his family became a major thing. Clarissa was playing for her parents' friends at a party, when Martin, seething as everyone else enjoyed music he couldn't hear, broke out in braying laughter and disrupted the performance. He was locked in his room and never allowed in a room where his sister was playing ever again.
- Foreshadowing: Lara urges her mom to learn to ride a bike, which Kai never did because riding bicycles is difficult for the deaf due to their lack of inner-ear balance. Finally she learns, and there's a scene in which Kai on a bike does not hear a big truck coming up behind her and honking its horn; the truck has to pass. Later, Kai is killed in a bicycling accident.
- Glasses Pull: At her big audition for the music conservatory at the end, Lara is so good that the admissions official briefly takes off his glasses and stares in admiration.
- Gratuitous English: Clarissa is showing Lara the lake by her house. They walk up to the edge and she says, in English, "This is my lake." It's the only line that actress Sybille Canonica delivers in English in the film.
- Happy Flashback: An angry conversation between Martin and Lara about Kai's death is followed by a brief flashback to Lara as a little girl teaching her mother to ride a bike.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier: At a parent-teacher conference Lara's teacher, who is worried that Lara is falling behind the desired reading level, may get held back if she doesn't improve. Lara chooses to not relay this message, telling her parents that the teacher is pleased to meet them and everything is going great.
- Instant Birth: Just Add Water!: The family is at a church service for the deaf when Kai's water breaks, out of nowhere. They rush to the hospital and Kai delivers Lara's little sister Marie.
- Jerkass: Lara's grandfather, Martin and Clarissa's father, who is just mean to everybody. Martin's mother says she never learned sign language because her husband wouldn't let her. Martin as a boy was isolated and shamed by his father for being deaf, but Clarissa for her part feels like she was the Unfavorite. At his own birthday party Clarissa's father turns nasty, mocking her for being a housewife who doesn't have a steady job.
- Lens Flare: A lens flare from a spotlight as Lara plays clarinet onstage is the Age Cut segue from Lara as a child to Lara as an 18-year-old.
- One-Book Author: This is the only film appearance for Alexandra Bolz, who plays Lara's little sister Marie.
- Repeating So the Audience Can Hear: Lara is given to saying both what she's signing to her parents and what her parents are signing back to her. This stands out the most when Martin is telling her a traumatic story from his childhood, and she feels the need to recite it back as he tells it. Presumably the idea was to minimize the amount of subtitles that the German theater audience had to read.
- Skinnydipping: Clarissa shows her mischievous free spirit when she strip off her clothes and goes swimming naked in the lake. Teenaged Lara is shocked (and she doesn't join in).
- Tactful Translation:
- Lara does this sometimes when translating for her parents. When her parents want to make an early withdrawal from a savings account and the bank officer is being uncooperative, Martin angrily demands that she "Ask him again!" Lara, who realizes that it's no use, instead tells the bank officer "My father says thank you. He's satisfied with our business."
- Sometimes she inverts this. At a parent-teacher conference her music teacher comes in and says he's glad to meet them and Lara is pretty talented. Lara instead tells her father "he says it's a shame that you never allow me to play the clarinet."
- Time-Shifted Actor: Lara is played by Tatjana Trieb as a child of eight or so, and by Sylvie Testud as an 18-year-old.
- Vicariously Ambitious: Lara eventually realizes that Clarissa is pushing her to go to music school so hard because Clarissa regrets not pursuing her own music career enough, and instead settling to be a Housewife (and now with a failed marriage).
