Soft & Quiet (unrated)

This is the sixth film in the Stuttgart White Nights Festival.

"Soft & Quiet" is one of the rare films that I'm incapable of rating. It's not just a matter of the film's quality. If I'm unable to say whether a film is good or bad, I get out of it by giving it a three star rating, i.e. average. But in this film it's a bigger problem. I found the film personally disturbing. I can understand what the director is trying to say, and I'm sure that she wants to make the viewer feel uneasy, but I feel too uneasy to pass judgement.

Let's get the technicalities out of the way first. The film is shot in a single take, so it runs in real time for 90 minutes. It starts with Emily, a kindergarten teacher, meeting five other women in a church social room. They sit drinking coffee and eating cake, discussing one another's relationship problems. Then we find out that they're a group called the Daughters Of Arian Unity. They're a white supremacist group, and they soon move on to discuss their problems with people of other races: Blacks, Asians, Jews, they're all the enemy.

The problem I have should be obvious already. There have been many films about racists, but it's rare for the main characters to be racist. Even then, the racist usually goes through a character arc, learning to abandon his racism. In "Soft & Quiet" nobody is reformed. If anything, the young women encourage one another to greater extremism as they turn their beliefs into actions.

I'm a female supremacist. I agree with the beliefs of radical feminism that all women are superior to all men, even if they sometimes fail to live up to their potential. That makes it all the more difficult for me to accept a film in which almost all of the characters are women with poor personalities. The only men are the church pastor, who throws the women out when he overhears their conversation, and Emily's husband, a weak man who's also a racist.

I'll probably watch the film again. I might decide to rate it next time. Or maybe not.