The film focuses on Traude (Monica Bleibtreu), an aged piano teacher who has come to teach at a prison. There she discovers one of the most disturbed and unreachable inmates, Jenny (Hannah Herzsprung), is in fact a piano virtuoso. To the dismay of one of the guards in particular, Mütze (Sven Pippig - also shown in the link above), Traude decides she must mentor Jenny and wants her to practice and compete despite resistance within the prison. So far, so simple. Is this just a film about the good in everyone, no matter what their past or failings?
Well, no. Not really at all. Because the plot thickens delightfully. Through a series of flashbacks we discover that the prison used to be a Nazi hospital, and a young Traude worked there during the second World War as a nurse; suddenly the halls and avenues are filled with loaded significance for us. Every time Traude is shown shuffling from her home through a set of gates, or resting on a bench, one can't help but feel as though she is really seeing another time, and living in another time entirely. So important to her are the incidents recounted in the flashbacks that a brilliant discrepancy of awareness develops. The viewer becomes a party, with creeping dread, to the awful trauma that Traude has experienced, while Jenny remains unaware and unsuspecting. We are even forced to re-evaluate Traude's relationship with Jenny in the light of her own past: can she really be drawn to someone so violent, so dangerously unhinged, and interact with her genuinely with affection? Was there always a darker motive behind her tuition of Jenny?
The musicality throughout the film is beautiful. What is most impressive and left the greatest impact was that although this is a film about classical piano, Jenny's own love of what Traude calls 'negro music', and the sounds from radios and popular shows, filters into the soundtrack. It is all the more affecting when we see Jenny play Schubert when we've just heard the grating of rock music from a warden's radio. It's carefully managed as well - silence is as important in a film about music as sound, and the moments of stillness as Traude shuffles past, or Jenny sits practising her finger movements on a fake piano she has made, are as loud as any section soundtracked.
I am wary of giving away too much plot; one of the thrills of this film is that it fails to follow a conventional path in setting out the narrative, even though it is easy to imagine a route this tale could take. By about half way through I genuinely did not know if Jenny would compete, or even could, as forces within and without the prison range against her, and her relationship with Traude becomes more and more strained. But that relationship between them is perhaps more important to the viewer than anything else, and in a way I did not mind how the film ended, just that I would see some sort of development of the bond between them. And as with watching any sociopath, the story was laced with the tension that comes with knowing that she might lash out at any moment. Traude knows that too, and yet she takes the chance to be near her. It is well worth the viewer taking that chance too.
A delight, dark, moving, wry and beautifully shot. Interwoven histories bring depth and engagement to wonderful imagined characters in a simple and involving plot.
***
2006
Monica Bleibtreu, Hannah Herzsprung, Sven Pippig
dir. and written by Chris Kraus
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