Cinema: The Power of Inaction in a Movie
The “Duck Mantra” and how it plays out
From PERFECT DAYS. 2023. Director: Wim Wenders. Screenwriters: Wenders, Takuma Takasaki. Cinematography: Franz Lustig.
Initial disclaimer: Like most of us, I can find screen action (i.e. violence) gripping, even intoxicating. Kurosawa’s samurai assaults, Spielberg’s D-Day landings, the antics of Kubrick’s clockwork droogs, and more recently Aster’s studiously articulated decapitations and “western” shoot-outs leave me breathless at every shot, angle, framing, and cut.
However, when I came across a comment from Michael Caine on advice that he received as a boy from his mother, it prompted me to reflect on opposite manifestations of what drama is:
Be like a duck, she said, Remain calm on the surface and paddle like hell underneath.
Quite apart from the relevance of this tenet to Caine’s acting and its understated nuances of expression in the most turbulent of moments, this “Duck Mantra” — as I like to call it — might further be applied to the simmer of what on the surface might appear a model of controlled character interaction but in its subterranean arteries roils with uncertainty and emotional turmoil.
It seems to me that this dichotomy can work in the following contexts (and surely there are others):
A seemingly quiet moment or scene in a narrative of gathering histrionics.
A scene that begins quietly but, as the audience knows, will culminate in pandemonium.
A quiet scene among many others in a seemingly “quiet” narrative.
In my book The Art of the Filmmaker, I break down the dinner scene in Hereditary, a largely static episode of almost unbearable tension. The guilt that both mother and son feel after the violent death of her daughter/his sister ricochets across the table as each attempts to project their own pain onto the other.
When Annie’s volcanic rage finally erupts, it settles for only the briefest hiatus before Peter, the son, takes a vicious verbal revenge on his mother who, beside herself with her consequent fury, storms out of the room to leave the movie’s 2:1 frame ringing with the gut-wrenching reverberations of the family tragedy and the conflict it has precipitated.
Ari Aster (once my student and as such also my teacher!) told me about how at a screening of The Irishman at the New York Film Festival, Martin Scorsese, in the Q&A began — to his disbelief and humility — to talk about this particular scene in his own film, praising the intensity of an episode in which, for so much of the time, the characters do little but eat supper, and not even that — pick absently at their meals as they trade barbs.
The viewer has already witnessed the visceral horror of daughter Charlie’s demise, a sequence so dynamically transfixing that it lives on in one’s mind throughout subsequent scenes, lacing them with dread. No need to pick up the fateful rumpus until later then. Meanwhile, this episode serves to — as Hitchcock once put it — make the audience suffer as much as possible.
It’s a while now since I watched The Godfather, but among movie scenes that start quietly but the audience knows will end in violence, the episode from The Godfather in which Michael Corleone meets with drug baron Solozzo and corrupt cop McCluskey with the intention of shooting both with a handgun hidden in the restaurant’s restroom, surely stands out.
The young Corleine ultimately carries out the plan with dispassionate precision but the excruciating anticipation latent in the deceptive stillness of the preliminaries to the double assassination comes back to me whenever I think of the film.
The greatest suspense demands inaction, perhaps. Or at least, little action, or everyday action, because when something extraordinarily dramatic happens it is often at its most powerful when it follows something ordinary.
Then there’s the apparently ordinary that follows the apparently ordinary…
The cinema of Yazujirō Ozu has had a profound effect on so many great filmmakers, Wim Wenders, with Perfect Days (2024) among them. Daily public toilet cleaning, hidden family tensions and severances, rudderless adolescent confusions, and cassette tapes and their value constitute the dramatic terrain of this movie. And yet… here is a film as deeply felt as any, a humanist film, a film that reveals the human soul in circumstances of the characters’ dailiness.
Someone commented to me that this was the worse film they had ever seen because “nothing happens.” For me, everything happens. It’s just that when it does, it isn’t in plain sight.
Charlotte Wells’ 2022 Aftersun is another movie that eschews the sensational. As a daughter and estranged father vacation with fellow Brits in a resort in Turkey, the film aches with humanity. Sophie’s need to connect with and understand Calum is set against his pain, powerfully evoked at one point as, with back to camera, he sobs his heart out. (A moment in a performance of masterly shading from Paul Mescal.) Blur, Chumbawambameanwhile, ring out over the holiday makers’ activities, lending a telling poignancy to this harrowing drama.
Andrew Haigh’s 2015 45 Years springs to mind too, its provincial inaction heartrending (despite the improbable contrivance of its English cross-class marriage). Pedro Almodóvar’s 2024 The Room Next Door also embodies a stealthy inaction that takes us to its snow falling faintly… upon all the living and the dead epiphany from James Joyce’s short story The Dead.
This is the cinema of the soul.
Action is in the mind once commented John Huston, adept at capturing both the shocking mafia hits of his Prizzi’s Honor and — coming back to that Joyce short story — the dramatic stillness of his adaptation of the author’s The Dead.
Action is in the heart too. And when it is, when it resonates there as we watch inaction on the screen, a film comes to life within us. While we may not be observers of “the ride” violent spectacle offers, we are rendered the participants in the under the surface paddling like hell drama of what, for so many of us, it is to be alive.
Peter Markham
August 2025