"He Changed His Name Again. The Pause Came Along as Luggage," Says Mirela Sund
Tobias Wirsing is now credited as Linus Aarde in The Quiet Tenant. Mirela Sund timed his silences with a watch and wants the watch compensated.
Eleven minutes into The Quiet Tenant, a man in a cardigan is asked whether he has seen the neighbour's cat. He looks at the middle distance. He looks at it for 2.4 seconds. Then he says no.
I have seen this pause before. I saw it last spring, when it was called Jonas Falke. I saw it the year before that, when it was called Piet Ravn. Tonight it is called Linus Aarde, and it has a new haircut.
The man underneath is Tobias Wirsing. He changes his name before every role, and he calls this process. He has told interviewers it lets him arrive empty. I have news for him. Nobody arrives empty carrying a 2.4 second pause.
I took a stopwatch to the screening room off Oranienstraße. The pause appeared 31 times. Before a question, before an answer, before a sip of tea, before the discovery of a body. The body, to its credit, did not wait for him.
A name is the cheapest costume in the building. It needs no fitting, no budget, no tailor. Wirsing has understood this and stopped there. The cardigan has a character. The shoes have a character. The name has a character. The actor has a pause, and the pause has no one in it.
There is a scene in the third act where Aarde learns that his landlady has been dead since August. This is the moment. Everything the film has built leans on him. He lets it lean for three full seconds, eyes slightly up, as if the answer were written on a ceiling in another building. Then he says, 'Oh.' The audience, to a person, had already said it for him.
I do not object to reinvention. A man may be reborn weekly if he likes. I object to the same performance being reborn with him, in a fresh credit, with fresh punctuation, asking to be reviewed as a stranger. I will review it as what it is. A long-running series with a rotating title card.
The Quiet Tenant runs 104 minutes. By my count, 77 seconds of it is Wirsing waiting to remember what he is going to say. That is longer than the chase scene. It is certainly more suspenseful, because with the chase you know they will arrive.
I suggest the next name be chosen after the pause is gone. Call yourself Dieter for all I care. Call yourself Tuesday. But come in on the cue. The landlady waited until August. The rest of us have trains.
