Other Titles • The Secret Life of Words • La Vida secreta de las palabras (2005)
Synopses for Vida secreta de las palabras, La (2005)
1.
THE SECRET LIFE OF WORDS, written and directed by Isabel Coixet, follows Hanna (Sarah Polley), a factory worker who lives alone in a barren apartment, wears a hearing-aid, and keeps to herself with a rigorous daily routine of identical meals, a fresh bar of soap every day, and needlepoint work at night. While on an extended holiday in Northern Ireland, she volunteers as a nurse, tending to a burn victim Josef (Tim Robbins) stationed on an oil rig. While Hanna coaxes him back to health, Josef, who has suffered temporary blindness, reaches out to her urgently, wanting to connect. As his brutish and passionate demeanor contrasts sharply with Hanna’s solemn and quiet manner, Hanna initially refuses to reveal anything about herself, even her real name. But she soon she starts to recognize parallels between her own isolation and that of the others on the oil rig. She eventually grows to care for Josef and shares with him a painfully severe secret from her past that opens wounds, and doors, for the two strangers from different worlds to come together and help heal one another.
With the shaky-camera technique, absence of a film score, and the backdrop of a lone oil rig, writer and director Coixet (who also wrote and directed Polley in the 2003 critically-acclaimed MY LIFE WITHOUT ME), emphasizes the vulnerability and seclusion of the characters. Robbins and Polley turn in compelling performances; and a strong supporting cast that includes Javier Camara (TALK TO HER) and Eddie Marsan (THE ILLUSIONIST).
2.
An isolated spot in the middle of the sea. An oil rig, where all the workers are men, on which there has been an accident. A solitary, mysterious woman who is trying to forget her past (Sarah Polley) is brought to the rig to look after a man (Tim Robbins) who has been temporarily blinded. A strange intimacy develops between them, a link full of secrets, truths, lies, humour and pain, from which neither of them will emerge unscathed and which will change their lives forever. A film about the weight of the past. About the sudden silence that is produced before a storm. About twenty-five million waves, a Spanish cook (Javier Cámara) and a goose. And, above all else, about the power of love even in the most terrible circumstances.
Hanna, a mysterious, introverted young nurse, accepts a job caring for perceptive, ironic Josef, a temporarily blind burn victim, on an oil rig in the Irish Sea. Nonoperational, the desolate rig is sparsely inhabited by a crew of loners, with only the roaring waves and a resident goose for distraction. As Hanna tends Josef's wounds, it soon becomes clear he's desperate to divulge secretsas if words and transparency will free him from his sightless, immobile state. Meanwhile, Hanna remains protectively silent, listening acutely but revealing little, and Josef never demands more. Incrementally, a sense of mutual recognition and empathy unfolds between them, gently evaporating shields of distrust and cynicism.
The Secret Life of Words, Isabel Coixet's intensely perceptive, wrenchingly cathartic love story, is about the need for human interdependence and the power of silence and speech to transcend trauma. There is endless pleasure in observing subtle, yet electric, exchanges between Hanna and Josef, played superbly by Sarah Polley and Tim Robbins. Though many of the crucial moments occur in Josef's isolated sick bay, Coixet's vision is never too claustrophobic or sober. The action whisks us to Copenhagen, to a quirky Spanish chef's kitchen, and across the wide-open monochromatic sea, which is like a newly blank slate upon which Hanna and Josef's future will be written.
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