Die siebente Saite

This is a great movie. It's a stunning look at the nature of music and it's a wonderful example of the relationship between music and film. So often in film, music is the afterthought; it's the last step of the production process and often the least considered through production. Corneau's film really works well to blend the visual medium of film with music and show them working in tandem for a brilliant result.

When you hear music in this film, you hear it because a character has picked up an instrument to play it. The film then cuts away from character and instrument, but the music remains and turns into a soundtrack that enhances the emotional power of the film. This is source music used as score, and very rarely do you see that in film. Using the music in this way really deepens the experience and strengthens both the images of the film and the emotion of the music. A music student gave me this movie to watch, and I want to pass it on to film students looking to blend the arts of film and music.

This is a beautiful movie - everything about it lingers on after you watch it. The music in particular...deep, sweet and sad. Gerard Depardieu is perfect as the ambitious and opportunistic talented viol musician. Alain Corneau makes his viewers feel as if they are right there, in every scene, experiencing the same emotions. Monsieur de Sainte Colombe chooses to live his life as a hermit, shut away from the artificiality and glamour of the royal court. His dedication to his dead wife and the music that he loves are the only things that keep him going. A strict disciplinarian, he forces his daughters to follow the example he has set them, and perhaps this is the reason for Madeleine's later sadness.

All in all, I felt that the film was a touching tribute to the sadness and grief that make true love so beautiful.

'Tous les matins du monde' opens with remarkable, yet quiet and simple audacity. For ten minutes, over the credits and beyond, the camera holds on the pained face of Gerard Depardieu. This shot, about as minimalist as you can get, manages to suggest so much: the actual scene itself (Depardieu as Marais giving a music lesson in Royal Chambers to a number of inept students), his own life and sense of failure, aging, dissipation of talent and emotional paralysis despite the signs of status and wealth, the intimations of a past and a place so alien to the modern and showy Court as to be on a different plane of time and space altogether. It is brilliant cinema, while seeming not very cinematic at all.

'Matins' combines two genres I generally find loathsome and redundant, and yet it is very nearly a masterpiece. First of all, it is a biopic; not really of Marais at all, but his one time teacher, Sainte-Colombe, solitary genius of the viol, and possibly the first Romantic artist, someone who composed not for Royalty or riches, but fore himself, from his own soul, alone. The problem with biopics is that they try to cram a whole life into two hours. This clearly doesn't fit, and so only the most superficial precis is possible, with a string of 'key' moments of formative psychological importance. The end result is something like those brief synopses of authors' lives you get at the beginning of books.

Corneau avoids this trap in a number of ways. There is the general atmosphere of fairy tale - the king and his courtiers; the 'cruel' father and the children he locks up in cellars; the abandoned lover and her jealous sister; the fairy-tale location, with its picturesque fragments of classical splendour, and moonlit tarns; the ghost story intrusion of revenants; the mysterious stranger who overturns the family's lives. This extends to the light, the mysterious blue glow that leaves the narrative in a twilight suspension. Depardieu's narration has the unadorned, measured simplicity of fairy tales, and the unmarked accumulation of events gives a timeless feel, one seperate from the historically verifiable Court.

Further, the film doesn't try to cram in the whole of Sainte-Colombe's life. The couple of decades it does deal with are marked by seeming repetiton and monotony. When he claims at one point to have an exciting emotional and imaginary life, his interlocutors are shocked, because they can only see the historical, physical, dour image, not the magic of a mind that converses with the dead, or outpours the most ascetically mournful music. There are key events, but these are domestic and personal (eg the death of his wife) that slowly shape his personality and the events of the film, not jarring 'Eureka!'-like moments. It is up to us to interpret the patterns, the reality behind the plain image, the unmovingly stern face, the routine events.

By the climax, the film stops being a biopic or historical reacreation, and becomes a heightened, spiritual embodiment of ideas about music, family, tradition. This is not to say the film is vague and ahistorical. It is very good about the marginalisation of equally talented women in this world of obsessive male art, where the only useful female is a dead one; and the brief, comical treatment of arbitrary monarchy is as pointed as anything in 'Ridicule'.

The other genre the film belongs to is the dreaded costume drama, that puffed up fashion parade of bourgeois aspiration, where the allusion to people who used their brains is enough to satisfy audiences who refuse to use theirs; where cufflinks and frills are creamily fetishised, and everything else - plot, character, ideas, subtext - is a mere mannequin. If the average costume drama is marked by bustle and excess, Corneau's film is private and austere. The only lavish costumes are made the object of ridicule - Sainte-Colombe, dressed in black and ruff like Monteverdi, and his daughters, live in sober surroundings, and dress very modestly. The usual period props - big homes, lavish halls, etc. - are stripped bare, become almost cell-like, unmarked by human residue.

This extends to the shooting style. The camera very rarely moves, framing the 'action' like a painting or a tableau vivant - the film's fertile theatricality extends to hearing feet thudding on the boards. This seeming visual parsimony is not too austere - unlike the films of Ozu, say, the static picture is broken up by regular editing which makes viewing less taxing. Corneau has learned a lesson about period dramas from Stanley Kubrick, director of the greatest period film, 'Barry Lyndon'. It's useless getting hstorical facts right and swamping the plot with detail - the heart and soul of any society is in its culture, and so Corneau, by recreating or alluding to famous paintings, music etc. gets closer to the truth of his characters. And the lighting...!

As a professional musician, there are two things that happen in films that are likely to make me quite angry. One is a general concern, and the other is a more elemental notion of the nature of music. This movie deals with both quite well.

The general concern deals with seeing somebody playing an instrument in a scene. It is very rare to see somebody in a film that really looks like they are playing the instrument they are holding. I will grant that it is unrealistic to expect a leading player who has devoted his/her training to the art of acting to be fully proficient on an instrument that a role may require, but more often than not, they are simply given the instrument without any sort of coaching on how the instrument should be held or where their hands should be when the instrument is making a certain sound. When this happens in a film, my ability to suspend disbelief goes right out the window never to return. This is not limited to lead players, however. Often a band that is supposed to be playing music in the background is made up of actors that have no conception of the operation of the arcane devices they are holding. To add insult to injury, the soundtrack seldom matches up to the instrumentation of the band. This movie does an admirable job at keeping things believable in this regard. The instruments are held correctly. The hands of the actors move as they should. With only a few exceptions, the instruments you hear are the ones that are on screen. Even in terms of historical ideas of ornamentation and execution, this movie has done its homework. It seems that most moviemakers regard music as trivial, and thus, they make little effort for accuracy where it is concerned. This movie, perhaps, works harder at it because of its subject matter, which leads me to part two of this diatribe.

What is music? That is the central idea of this film. There is also a story involving a master viol player and his young student who seduces and abandons his eldest daughter, but it is simply a frame for the central question. If you attempt this sort of thing, you are on dangerous ground as far as I am concerned. It is an attempt that isn't made very often. Movies like Amadeus and Farinelli, entertainment value notwithstanding, are more about the personalities involved, and music is the frame rather than the central question. Others, like the contemptible Mr. Holland's Opus, boil the answer down into some trivial concept like "Let the music play you." The answer is not that easy. Speech may not even be capable of expressing it. That is the struggle of this film. The young student is quite talented. His technique is immaculate. The master sees and admits this quite freely. He is even unconcerned that the young student is taking some of his ideas and using them in his own music for publication. He has nothing to teach him as far as technical matters go. His struggle lies in making him a musician instead of a glorified musical acrobat. In this framework, it would be easy to degenerate into the flaccid trivialities that Mr. Holland's Opus embraces, but this film does not do that. It even lines these idiotic platitudes up in order to shoot them down. (In a scene later in the film when the young man returns to the master's villa to hear him play before he dies, the master asks him, "Have you learned that music is not for kings?" "I have learned that music is for God." he replies. The master answers, "No. God can speak for himself.") It is a tangled and complex question. All of the simple generalizations are systematically lined up and exposed for the twaddle that they are.

So what is the answer? This film knows, but if you don't have some inkling of the answer, you may come away from this film with nothing more than an interesting story set in the music world of 17th century France. I have no idea if the historical details of the story are accurate, and it doesn't matter a jot if they are or not. This movie is about a difficult and complex idea that few have even attempted to tackle, let alone delineate it so beautifully. If the question can be answered for you, this film will do it.

'Tous les matins du monde' is more an experience than a movie. The brainchild of director Alain Corneau, writer Pascal Quignard, and musician Jordi Savall this film integrates the visual with the historicodramatic and the music that created the idea and bathes it in the most sensuously beautiful cinematography of a period (the 17th century) by Yves Angelo who is given the sets and design and costumes by Bernard Vézat and Corinne Jorry that create image after image of masterful still life. The total integration of the work of these masters is the plinth on which the actors offer the memory of two famous composers in French classical music history.

Saint-Colombe (Jean-Pierre Marielle) is a viol player and composer whose wife (Caroline Sihol) dies young leaving him to raise his two daughters young Madeleine (Violaine Lacroix) and young Toinette (Nadège Teron)whom he teaches his art of viol de gamba performance while sequestering himself and his girls in the countryside. Into their garden comes the young handsome son of a shoemaker, Marin Marais (Guillaume Depardieu, the son of Gerard Depardieu) who commits to learning the viol and eventually becomes a court musician only to fall in love with Saint-Colombe's elder daughter Madeleine (Anne Brochet) whom he eventually leaves for the glories of the court. As an adult (Gérard Depardieu pere) he realizes his error and returns to the Saint-Colombe sanctuary where he learns the true meaning of music as being something beyond words and thus something beyond human.

In the course of this quiet little film and in the dramatic lighting of the production design we hear the music of Couperin, Lully, as well as compositions by Marais and Saint-Colombe. Jordi Savall supplies the incidental music that binds these works and offers the viol playing together with a talented group of musicians. The story is small, the dialogue sparse (primarily Depardieu pere narrating his experience as Marais) and for the novice the film could be slow. But the incandescent beauty both visually and aurally make this film a work of art that has not been equaled since its appearance on the scene in 1991. It is a treasure. Highly recommended. Grady Harp