The Kreutzer Sonata

I saw The Kreutzer Sonata at its first showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival and I didn't enjoy it at all. I'm not sure if the dialogue was scripted or improvised but it was rambling and boring. It's not even an original idea to make a film based on the Tolstoy story and the Beethoven sonata which inspired it - when I searched for the title I found 13 previous versions, the first made in 1911. I haven't seen any of them, but some surely must be better than this latest attempt. The music sounded good, but that's the only good point. The acting was wooden, the plot dragged, the voice-overs were very irritating. I advise you to avoid this film.

Wow, what an energising film. I'm tempted just to smash the keyboard and follow that up with some choice expletives. But I don't think the IMDb will allow such behaviour. I had no expectations for this film at all, it's the post-Oscars desert (just after the pre-Oscars desert), pre-Cannes, very pre-the-time-we-get-to-see-films-from-Cannes. I had a menu of blatantly market-driven pap and this oddity to choose from, but I've been so long without a proper film at the cinema that I broke, and went to see this one, how bad could it be if there was Beethoven playing? And hey, once I got into it I could see the director really believes in Tolstoy, you can see that in this movie, and you can see it by looking at his filmography and witnessing his continued desire to treat Tolstoy's works. In collaboration with Lisa Enos, the source material has really been updated, and is thoroughly modern. There's a line in the movie about how the world is run for women. Anyone that doubts that, we're told, should go to the mall, nine out of ten shops, don't contain a thing that a man would consider buying for himself. Damn that's so glorious. A giddy thought in a giddy movie. You are free to either take it as having a grain of truth or as sheer male paranoia.

It's all inspired by Beethoven's Opus 47, the Violin Sonata number 9. This piece is for violin, with accompaniment by piano. It's made clear, and it is not hard to follow, that with this piece, the to and fro between the two musicians, is like sex. In Prinet's painting of 1901 (accessible on the Kreutzer Sonata's Wikipedia page), you can see the male violinist, having finished the piece making moves to ravish the female pianist.

So we have Danny Huston playing Edgar, a vain and handsome middle-aged trust-funder, who seems to do little more with his time than fornicate and spend half a day a week "running" a charitable foundation (feet up behind the desk). For some reason I couldn't find it in my heart to dislike him, as, given the chance, I would probably prefer to spend my time doing such things as rolling around on a rug with a classical pianist who looks like Elizabeth Röhm, in between sips of white wine and ravenous biting of crayfish, a bolus of which mixed by her saliva sliding down my throat as I slip into her (not in this life!). His roguish good looks and faux bonhomie dampened down the truth that Edgar would probably be the most objectionable person I could ever meet in real life!

There are some outstanding drawn out graphic sex scenes in this movie which didn't look simulated. I'm one of these guys who often roll my eyes at sex scenes in movies, but I was all the way there on this one. After the initial banquet of fornication which forms the early stage of the relationship between Edgar and Abby (Röhm), comes marriage and two children, and the relationship sours somewhat. Abby "wants her life back", spoilt as she is. Edgar becomes increasingly jealous and in an act of Faustian indulgence starts to believe she is having an affair with a young violinist, whom he introduced to her, expecting from the start that she would sleep with him.

The cheap visual effects are somehow brilliant, back-to-basics, almost winding back the clock to the 1920s. They make the very melodramatic Tolstoyan madness of Edgar come alive without looking silly. The hand-held shooting style also manages to work, it takes the edge off the luxuriant milieu of the film, which otherwise may have appeared too glossy.

Watching this movie for me was like getting drunk, really that intoxicating. Edgar's attitude to Abby is wonderfully decadent, at one point, referring to her, he says, "nothing can nor should hold a wild animal back". Thank you Mr Bernard Rose for a movie that was like Starship Troopers II, only good.

Beethoven's masterful "Kreutzer" Violin Sonata inspired Tolstoy to write a short story of the same name. Incidentally, the short story inspired Leos Janacek to write a string quartet that is also nicknamed "Kreutzer Sonata." Although the setting of the story has been changed from the 19th century to contemporary time, the essence of Tolstoy remains. The presentation is initially muddled, but turns into a fairly interesting story about jealousy. What keeps this from being a better film is the inept direction. Director Rose did the cinematography as well and he unfortunately chose to use a hand-held camera throughout for no good reason. It is extremely distracting.

I really liked this movie. I thought it had a good story, great music, great acting, and was thoroughly enjoyable.

Danny Houston is very good in his role of a many who seduced and married a young women, had two children and now is extremely jealous of his young wife, suspecting she is having an affair. Elizabeth Rohm is outstanding as a promising musician who gets involved with Houston and ends up unexpectedly getting pregnant. The movie flash forwards four years and the couple is now married and have 2 children. Houston's character is now well to do and very successful but Rohm's character is very unfulfilled. She longs to renew her career as a pianist and she starts to tutor a young violinist. This sets the stage for suspicions and the story follows along that theme.

This new movie should use another name besides 'The Kreutzer Sonata.' It may be based on the novella by Leo Tolstoy but it is nothing like it. I just read the novella and it was so much more powerful, and emotional. The real Kreutzer Sonata was raw. And it is sad what it has been turned into. The original was real, depicting the true faces of reality. And above all it was used as a tool to spread a philosophy and a message of Tolstoy's which is nowhere to be found in the contemporary defacement of the old classic.

In the original the basic story is about lust, and the problems of the structured institutionalized world we live in. Tolstoy's main points revolve around the idea of marriage and its lost meaning. He also speaks at length about the purpose of sex, of sexual pleasure, and the purpose of life and procreation... ..much of which can not and will not be understood by many.