GIRL'S SILENT BATTLE ECHOES THOUGH `QUIET ROOM'.

Byline: Stephen Holden The New York Times

Sometimes silence speaks much louder than words. And when the unnamed 7-year-old girl (Chloe Ferguson) who is the central character in Rolf de Heer's magical film ``The Quiet Room'' senses her parents' worsening marital strife, her instinctive reaction is to clam up. Her refusal to talk as the weeks go by becomes both an exasperating form of protest and a calculated maneuver to try to reunite them through their worry over her.

Rarely has a movie entered the consciousness of a child as deeply and convincingly as ``The Quiet Room,'' which was filmed in Adelaide, Australia. What holds together this beautifully woven series of impressionistic family scenes and occasional flashbacks is the girl's artless voice-over narration. You never question for a second whether her observations or vocabulary might be precocious for someone her age.

Although years away from developing a sophisticated psychological sense of the world, she has an unerring instinct for the essential truth of a situation. She knows when she's being lied to, can instantly gauge the emotional temperature in a room, and is highly critical of the quality of attention being paid her.

Her overwhelming desire is to restore the happy equilibrium of four years earlier, when her parents used to pick her up in their arms for delicious, warm ``family hugs.'' And the movie's snippets of the girl as a 3-year-old (played by Ferguson's younger sister Phoebe) roughhousing with her parents capture the delirious joy of a child absorbing familial love through every pore. One of the film's most poignant moments is a scene in which the girl, now silent, pleads wordlessly for a family hug, and the estranged parents tensely go through the motions of a ritual that feels like an excruciating sham.

Brooding in her spare blue bedroom with its rows of Barbie dolls stacked in one corner, the girl spends much of her spare time making stick figure crayon drawings that illustrate her anxiety about the unraveling family knot. She longs for a dog and a home in the country. And in the film's few cliched images, she fantasizes about running on the beach with a golden retriever.

``The Quiet Room'' deliberately withholds information about the source of her parents' marital strife. We overhear pieces of arguments, and in the most painful scenes, the girl cringes as she hears them coming to blows. She also senses ahead of time the moment when each parent (Paul Blackwell is the hot-tempered working-class father and Celine O'Leary the more elegant and scaldingly critical mother) is about to take her aside to explain they are separating. The film's credibility relies heavily on Ferguson's carefully understated central performance. Not only does the girl refuse to talk, in most of her encounters with her family she maintains a poker-faced expression as part of her dramatically withholding attitude. But because she is also a little girl, her air of secret superiority is extremely fragile. Her recurrent nightmares of panthers menacing the house require parental comforting.

The cinematography (by Tony Clark) does a nicely inconspicuous job of conveying a child-eye's view of the world. The patterns in the carpeting loom large. And the camera continually finds her looking up at the grown-ups.

``The Quiet Room'' is much more than a portrait of an adorable child coping with a potentially traumatic family crisis. It is an exploration of the power that children wield over their parents and an almost intimidating reminder that not much escapes our children's vision, as much as we wish it might. Every joyous hug, every casual dismissal, every harsh word registers and is recorded.

The movie falters only in its final minutes, when it gives the story an abrupt, absurdly sentimental resolution. Until that moment, it evokes the seismic tremors of family life with a remarkable sensitivity to every tiny shift.

THE FACTS

The film: ``The Quiet Room'' (PG; young children could be upset by a physical battle between the parents).

The stars: Celine O'Leary, Paul Blackwell, Chloe Ferguson and Phoebe Ferguson.

Behind the scenes: Written and directed by Rolf de Heer. Produced by Domenico Procacci and de Heer. Released by Fine Line Features.

Running time: One hour, 31 minutes.

Playing: Landmark's Samuel Goldwyn Pavilion Cinema.

Our rating: Three Stars.