As I wrote recently in a post about the horror film Winchester, I’m a fan of historical films that simply use the period as a backdrop to the story as opposed to using the story as a means of investigating the period. I find it encouraging to think that elements of human nature have remained the same over time—that there’s something I can feel that connects me with the people of the past. Too many movies set in the past treat their subjects as morally inferior to the people of the present, making it all too easy to judge them. (This would summarize my reservations with Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water.) How humbling, then, to encounter characters in a past era who are just as complex as we are (or, in the case of a recent example like André Téchiné’s Golden Years, even more mysterious), experiencing the same problems and satisfactions.
Mute kicks into gear when Naadirah goes missing and Leo determines to find her. Discovering that she had worked as prostitute, Leo investigates Berlin’s criminal underworld to learn where she may have gone. He crosses paths on several occasions with Cactus Bill and Duck, but neither doctor wants to help him in his pursuit, despite having some connection to Naadirah. Anyway Cactus Bill is too preoccupied with securing forged passports so he and his daughter can return to the States. (Like many a port town in old noir films, Jones’s Berlin is filled with people who are trying to leave; the characters’ transitory nature adds to the portrait of the city as a whole, making it seem particularly alienating.) Bill’s mission parallels Leo’s: the alcoholic surgeon as desperate to get out of Berlin as the bartender is to rescue his girlfriend.
