The Silence

Two Swedish women and a ten-year-old boy, Johan, are returning from a holiday, and break their journey in a foreign city, Timoka, where the language is incomprehensible. In a hotel suite it becomes obvious that Ester and Anna are at odds with each other. Ester is an intellectual, a translator suffering from some strange lung disease that almost causes her to suffocate during her spasms. Anna is the opposite, sensual, indolent, and sexually frustrated because she finds the lesbian relationship with her partner ever more repugnant and meaningless. After seeing a couple copulate vigorously in a dimly-lit cabaret, she seduces the waiter from a nearby café. Later, after a quarrel, Ester is forced to watch a repetition of this love-play, and the film ends with Anna´s leaving Timoka with her son Johan while Ester sinks into a presumably fatal coma.