Quiet Life, directed by Alexander Avranas, shows how the stress of being a Russian refugee in Sweden can result in resignation syndrome (a ‘shutting down’).
Cold Comfort
by Alexa DalbyQuiet Life
CAUTION: Here be spoilers
Quiet Life is a highly stylised film. It is shot with an unmoving camera, giving the impression of a series of still portraits. All the characters wear white or pastel-coloured clothing, apart from the central family, who stand out from their surroundings by wearing dark colours or black. We see the family – father Sergei (Grigoriy Dobrygin), mother Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova), and daughters Alina (Naomi Lamp) and Katya (Miroslava Pashutina) lining up formally for the camera.
We then see them in a featureless beige apartment with minimal furniture and no decoration suffering an intrusive, patronising visit by Swedish migration office workers dressed, both dressed in dull beige raincoats. Later, the couple have therapy in a gleaming white, sterile clinic.
The family are compliant and try to fit in in their new country. They put up with stern, immovable, dehumanising bureaucracy, even though they were thinkers and teachers in Russia. The doctors, social workers and migration officers they see in their quest for asylum seem like soulless robots whose cold monotones do not deviate from the official script. Even for their asylum interview the interpreter is only available on a speaker phone.
First one daughter and then the other suddenly falls into a coma from resignation syndrome. This is a phenomenon seen only in Sweden among Eastern European refugee children when their parents are refused asylum. Many suffer from this ‘shutting down’, due to the fear of what could happen if they return to the country they fled from. The treatment is cruel and surreal – children are removed from their parents and the parents have therapy in how not to appear anxious. The couple will do anything to get their daughters back so they submit to a determinedly smiling mood therapist (Alicia Eriksson). There’s one sympathetic nurse in the clinic, Adriana (Eleni Roussinou), but she is restricted in what help she can give.
Natalia and Sergei are not allowed to visit their daughters and can only see them through glass. Eventually they spring them from the clinic and take them for hydrotherapy in a swimming pool.
Alexander Avranas also directed Miss Violence in 2013, which deals with a different form of child abuse. In Quiet Life he spotlights a phenomenon that affects several hundred people a year and through the way it is filmed, he shows the stress of being a refugee trying to make a life in a new and strange country.
Quiet Life premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 29 August 2024. International representation is by The PR Factory.
