Hide Your Smiling Faces (2013, dir. Daniel Patrick Carbone) – Steven Marshall
The opening visual of ‘Hide Your Smiling Faces’ is of a close-up of a snake slowly devouring a fish. This strangely beautiful and haunting moment both disturbs and fascinates as the shot lingers with curiosity. This one scene sums up everything that Patrick Carbone’s debut feature is about – the mystery of death, the uncertainty of life and confronting mortality.
Set in an unnamed rural community, the story follows two brothers Tommy and Eric (Ryan Jones and Nathan Varson) as they explore the landscape of their town. The notion of death and dying is one that hovers over the brothers and their friends as they play in woodland and decaying buildings. As adolescents, the thought of death is incomprehensible as they play with a dead bird and pretend to shoot each other in the head with a BB gun.
The plot only really develops when Ian (Ivan Tomic), one of the brothers’ close friends shows them his dad’s gun. After being caught by Ian’s father and scolded for getting the gun, he tells his son to go and cry in the woods. This scene looms over the rest of the film, as Ian’s father’s demeanour appears to be that of a loner, disconnected from the world and his son for some unknown reason.
The film has a minimalist approach with its mostly silent scenes and sparse dialogue making this a story driven by emotion. When the discovery of Ian’s body near a bridge is made, it is never clear if he has fallen, committed suicide, or perhaps even been murdered by his father. The brothers never really discuss the accident, instead the impact is played out through the use of the landscape and the brothers’ relationship to it. The director consistently puts death into the hands of the boys as they go near ledges of buildings and almost drown in a lake, putting them face to face with the dangers of nature.
There are no grand statements or epiphanies about life or death in ‘Hide Your Smiling Faces’ – instead the director opts to confront the idea of mortality as the brothers do with confused emotions. This creates an unsettling aura and a tension between the brothers and their friends as they try to comprehend an event they cannot fully understand.
Hide Your Smiling Faces features at BFI London Film Festival 2013.
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