Until his arrival, Silence plays more or less like a straightforward story of religious persecution, but like Dostoevsky’s inquisitor, he puts to Rodrigues a series of questions that shake the foundations of his faith, and tie it at last to the long and bloody history of European colonialism.Rodrigues is mainly concerned with preaching to the converted, but Inoue reminds him how so many Japanese were induced to take up Catholicism, and, more importantly, to what end.

Like The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence is a movie that perches on both sides of a divide, pitting one form of monstrousness against another. It’s a profoundly moving story, and a profoundly, and deliberately troubling one. Inoue’s innovation is to threaten Rodrigues not with physical harm but with spiritual torment, especially the agony of watching his fellow Christians suffer. He confronts him with the idea that his piety is merely a form of vanity, that if he worships a god, and especially a Christ, who sacrificed himself for humanity’s sake, then he ought to be able to do likewise, even if that sacrifice is public blasphemy.

Is he meant to follow Jesus’s example, or is to emulate him an act of the most profound hubris? At the moment before he is finally captured, Rodrigues sinks to his knees and catches his reflection in the water, and for a moment it gives way to a drawn image of Christ’s face. It could be a vision or merely a desperate hallucination; how we see it depends on our own faith.

The most nagging question in Silence occurs in the realm where evangelism and artistic creation overlap. Towards the end of his journey, Rodrigues is at last brought to question whether the people he’s ostensibly converted even know what they’re worshipping. They call themselves “Kirishitan”, and they disguise their icons and even their prayers as Buddhist practices - but in doing so, are they keeping the faith or perverting it?

Can one’s belief ever be conveyed to another, or is it only ever between them and the gods they worship? Scorsese has been etching his beliefs onto celluloid for almost 50 years, and their meanings remain as evanescent, as mysterious, as ever. Silence is not a film to be solved, or resolved, but pondered. It’s not a parable. It’s a koan.

★★★★☆

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