The Pact Of
Silence (2003)
aka: Le Pacte Du Silence
thriller
directed
by : Graham Guit
featuring
: Gerard Depardieu - Elodie Bouchez - Isaac Sharry - Carmen Maura
running
time : 1 hour 29 minutes
Sarah (Elodie Bouchez) a young Carmelite
nun, collapses in pain, dazed and spouting a nonsense phrase. Concurrently,
a great distance away, her identical twin sister, Gaëlle (also Bouchez),
in prison, wakes up to find her cell in flames. While Gaëlle, the
victim of an attack by her fellow prisoners, is transferred to a different
prison, Joachim (Gerard Depardieu), a Cecilian (both a doctor and a priest)
visits with Sarah. He's perplexed by her case because her tests all came
back normal, and he deducts that her spells must have a psychological source.
But Sarah isn't forthcoming about her past, and Mother Emmanuelle (Carmen
Maura), who runs the convent, doesn't even want Joachim to treat the young
woman. Through his investigations, Joachim learns that Sarah has a twin
sister, to whom she may have some kind of psychic connection. Delving deeper
into the past, he discovers that Gaëlle went to prison for a horrible
crime at around the same time Sarah entered the convent. Joachim is dealing
with the violence of his own past, and cannot let go of his prying, despite
the advice of his colleagues. He finds Gaëlle after she is released
on parole, and takes her in. Their relationship becomes more complicated,
and they are threatened by others who would prefer that the past stay buried.
The Pact Of Silence was based on a novel by Marcelle Bernstein. It was
adapted for the screen by Roselyne Bosch (1492: Conquest Of Paradise) and
directed by Graham Guit. The film had a theatrical release in France, but
was released straight-to-video in the U.S.
The first ten minutes of The Pact
Of Silence is a confusing jumble, as the film cuts between scenes featuring
Bouchez playing both a Carmelite nun and an incarcerated woman who has
committed a terrible crime. At first, it's unclear what the relationship
is between the two women. Are the prison scenes flashbacks? The filmmakers,
to their credit, take their time revealing that the two women are twins,
and things pretty much go downhill from there. Once the basic facts of
the case are established, the film can either take the seemingly inevitable
path to a predictable conclusion or it can go off the rails into absurd
melodrama. The makers of this film took the latter path. The film is filled
with unclearly motivated, even bizarre, actions and loose ends that render
its thriller plot substantially less engaging than it should be. The expert
cinematography, decent performances, and the neat Vertigo allusion at the
end of the film don't add up to a satisfying experience.