The restaurant in Copenhagen is full on Friday evening. In the cozy candlelight, a woman tells her friend about her last date, at another table a son tells his father about his future plans with his own band. A birthday cake is carried through the crowd to Marie, who is almost nine years old. That’s when the first shot is fired. Then another. And another one. The screen goes black, terror and panic continue.
You’d think the Danish series When the silence falls act of terror. After just 75 seconds of the first episode, an attack heralds an inevitable recalculation in the life of the characters. But it’s not about violence and guns or the people who hold them. They are not the focus of the narrative. It’s about eight people and their families, for whom nothing will be the same after this evening as before. The viewer accompanies them nine days before and nine days after the attack – knowing what happened and what will happen. In order to hold together the network of people that is spanned over Copenhagen, the series is reduced to the essentials. The direction (Milad Alami, Iram Haq, Jeanette Nordahl) focuses on the characters, often isolating them in close-up against a plain background. One picture glides into the next in quick cuts and shows how one storyline affects the next.
The drama tells of the cohesion of a society
There is Justice Minister Elisabeth Hoffmann (Karen-Lise Mynster), for example, who looks back on a successful political career shortly before retiring. She wants to manifest her legacy of tolerance and integration politics with an ambitious law. The fact that her partner was sitting in the Hog restaurant that evening changes everything – her attitude, her character, her politics. Your decisions affect the life of Jamal (Arian Kashef). Like the rest of the family, he is harassed by his tyrannical older brother. Jamal’s opportunities to live out his homosexuality openly are limited, his escape routes are cut off, and the only person who seems genuinely interested in him turns out to be the local crime boss.
In ten hours, screenwriters Dorte W. Høgh and Ida Maria Ryden let the connections between the characters emerge vividly. The characters of Elisabeth and Jamal stand out in the series because they create a microcosm. The question of the collective sense of responsibility arises, especially with the mighty and yet human Elisabeth. Some of the eight Copenhageners are strangers to each other, but they do not live independently of one another in the Danish capital. They move on an axis between power and a lack of prospects, between wealth and poverty and between social recognition and exclusion. When the silence falls is not a series about terror. The drama tells of the cohesion of a society and sounds like an appeal against the radically restrictive immigration policy of Denmark.
Arte, July 29th, from 10 p.m. and on Media library