This high-minded, dense and in many ways impressive drama about classical music from Canadian director Sofia Bohdanowicz could serve as an introspective companion piece to Tár. Where Todd Fields’ film was concerned with artists out in the world and modern cancel culture, here the focus is unswervingly on art itself: its inner sustaining emotional function for the artist and, more widely, for all of us.
Deragh Campbell stars as academic researcher Audrey Benac, a character she has played before for Bohdanowicz, including in Veslemøy’s Song, the 2018 short from which Measures for a Funeral has been expanded. This time Audrey is on the trail of Kathleen Parlow, a virtuosic real-life 20th-century violinist who, in this film, tutored her grandfather. Music weighs heavily on the Benac family; as Audrey rifles through university archives, she receives guilt-ridden calls from her dying mother, a failed musician who holds her responsible for her stalled career. Carrying her grandfather’s instrument like some form of penance, this timorous student seems to be seeking redemption through her interest in Parlow, a maverick who refused marriage in order to dedicate herself to her art.
From a textured Peter Greenaway-esque opening that intercuts a classical score being scanned, an orchestra tuning up, the Montreal skyline and Audrey on the phone to her mum, Bohdanowicz often displays something close to virtuosic technique herself. As Audrey shadows Parlow in London and Oslo, an ever-present undertone of unease threatens to bloom into full-blown horror. When she meets Elise (real-life prodigy Maria Dueñas), a hurricane of a violinist who melds with Parlow in her fantasies, it feels like we’re stepping into an Alfred Hitchcock dream.
However, the elliptical style and stilted dialogue, with Audrey’s conversations often sounding like academic commentary, make the film hard to love. Adrift between Parlow’s reminiscences and her researcher’s travels and sullen reveries, it feels like a speculative symphony trying to recreate its own score.
But the uncertainty and inhibition are perhaps the point. “It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. It’s possible it’s intentionally fragmentary. A lack of precision can be a conscious strategy,” says Audrey, defending a lost opus Parlow once performed and that she now wants to put on stage. This feels like Bohdanowicz justifying her own approach – and by extension the fumbling accommodation with life that all artists, and maybe all human beings, must practise. Fully committed to a radical irresolution, this simultaneously alienating and beautiful film bears repeat viewing.
• Measures for a Funeral is at the ICA, London, from 22 August.
