Argerich

Films are hard, documentaries are harder and documentaries about artists are nearly impossible.

This one is composed of mostly home movies, assembled by a daughter. A problem is that this woman had a difficult childhood, what with many step-siblings from different absent fathers. The film is clearly her project to fix what she saw as broken while celebrating what she cherished.

Through these eyes, we are also supposed to get something of value. The possibilities are there I suppose, but in these amateur hands all we get is raw exposure. A more brutal treatment could have produced something powerful.

Here we have a woman, originally from Argentina. She has romantic power of a very specific kind, that Latin energy absorbed threefold into immigrant hearts. A prodigy, she channels this into passionate romantic performances, thrilling the world in 1965 by winning the Chopin competition. We have so-called lost performances made shortly thereafter that are Chopin more erotic than he could be, more forceful than he was. Seductive, not dissipative.

This was from a period of her life as a traveling artist, one experimenting with loves that cannot be performances. You need to listen to this, emotion that runs dangerously. Afterward, she had many failed loves. She is still celebrated, and still among our best technicians. Her music still has energy but not that early passion.

Surely she knows this. There is a brief conversation where she hints the one night stand-induced first pregnancy took that energy. (This birth was our filmmaker's.) Surely she knows the change. Does she mourn? Does being a woman in search of a partner and repeatedly failing give or take from the art? I believe that she could tell us. I believe that she could tell us enough that when we hear her later Chopin we will get it, the nuance of remembered rather than anticipated passion. About sex transformed into family. About health, energy and rest.

But not here. Not in this film, alas.

This film, made by Stephanie Argerich, daughter of Martha Argerich is a fascinating work. It is an exploration of a complex mother-daughter relationship in the usually always difficult relationship between child and famous parent. By the end we feel we know more about Martha but also about her daughters and related family members, including Martha's ex-husbands. There is a generosity about how the various people are presented, warts and all, but without bitterness. Argerich did have a difficult task in managing the roles of (largely solo) parent with being an international soloist, especially with her first daughter Lyda, who, the film shows, seems to have been reconciled with the older Martha and her 'family" milieu. The film does not deal with how Martha constructs her interpretations of music nor about how she maintains her technical prowess. She comes across as a very intuitive person who realises that that is her strength and does not want to jeopardise that quality by analysis. Indeed, it is by her body language and facial expressions that we infer what she is like, rather than what words she utters. No matter what achievements these great artists have made in other respects they are just as fragile, and error prone as the rest of us.

We know about the great musicians of the past only from written stories if they lived and played until the end of the 19th century. We can only imagine and read the stories of the contemporaries about the sound of the violin of Paganini, or the piano under the hands of Chopin or Liszt. Sound recordings started to be available at the end of the 19th century, and film rendition soon after, with film and sound synchronized since the end of the 20s. The great advantage of the artists playing today is that their music is available - if they allow, of course - for the times to come on recordings and films. More recently their lives and careers became also subject of documentary movies. Form now on not only their music but also their lives, characters, loves, families crisis can be documented for the posterity - if they allow so (or even if the do not, I guess).

I have seen three of them recently, all made in the last two years. The first was the closest to the traditional documentary genre retracing the life and career of the Hungarian-born conductor George Solti. The second one focused on how the Chinsese pianist Lang Lang grew up under the strong influence of his father and how he built a world-famous career starting from the very improbable career of a Chinese workers one-child family. Today I have seen Bloody Daughter, the documentary that Stephanie Argerich dedicated to her mother, the famous Argentinian pianist.

If somebody wanted a proof that it is practically impossible to live the life of a great artist and build a normative family with happy partners and children, Bloody Daughter is certainly one. Stephanie is the younger of the three daughters that Martha Argerich had with three different partners, and much of the film is dedicated into bringing together the pieces of the biography of a pianist who was another of these wonder children, raised and educated to be an artist - but also a beautiful woman, with a strong and unconventional character who decided to live her life as she wished to, placing her career at the highest priority. She is also a woman who does not have much of verbal communication skills, so although there is a lot of private footage of her on screen she talks very little about her art (and no great wisdom results) or even about her private life or feelings - we understand more from her looks, her facial expression, her eyes.

Stephanie Argerich wanted this film to be not only about her mother but also about herself, her feelings, the relationship with her mother. There are implicit questions that she seems to want to ask her but never dares to. The puzzle of the family relations is carefully built in the first hour of the film, with the story of each one of the three daughters retraced and brought to its place. I would have personally wanted to dig more into the Jewish past of the family, but this seems to be a subject that neither Stephanie, nor Martha queried too much - maybe this is not that important to them, something buried in the past of Martha's parents for unknown reasons never asked about. The last third of the movie does not bring too many new and interesting information about the great artist, and instead of the redundant family footage more music would have been preferable. Of course, this is just a personal opinion, but it might be shared by the many of us who love her art.