A Late Quartet

This is a late post too - as we screened the film last night.

I'd wanted to see this as soon as I read the reviews and I was not disappointed: it was definitely one of the highlights of the season.  It also made me order a recording of Beethoven's String Quartets, and I'm currently working my way through these.

Here are my notes:

A Late Quartet

USA 2012                    105 minutes

Director:                      Yaron Zilberman

Starring:                        Catherine Keener, Christopher Walken, Mark Ivanir and Philip Seymour Hoffman

“A subtle, intelligent picture with a suitably resonant title, it quietly observes the internal dynamics of the Fugue String Quartet, an internationally acclaimed musical group founded and based in New York that has been playing around the world for 25 years. We encounter them as an entity, working together thoughtfully, a trifle self-regarding perhaps, and then we get to know them as individuals...  A Late Quartet is visually and musically rich. But above all there are the performances, individually and as an ensemble, and they're pitch perfect.”

Philip French

When cellist Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken) discovers that he is in the early stage of Parkinson’s disease he breaks the news to the other members of the Fugue String Quartet.  This devastating announcement throws the quartet into confusion and they begin to consider their own careers as musicians in the face of an uncertain future.

The film, a first feature by documentary maker Yaron Zilberman, includes a great deal of chamber music, including Beethoven’s Opus 131, the String Quartet No 14 in C sharp minor, one of his Late String Quartets.  These were the composer’s last major completed compositions and are widely considered to be among the greatest musical pieces of all time.  In the film Peter gives a lecture on this string quartet to his students: he points out that the quartet has seven movements instead of the usual five and that Beethoven specified that it should be played attacca, i.e. with no pause between the movements.  He links the passing of time in both music and life by quoting the first ten lines of another quartet: Burnt Norton, the first part of TS Eliot’s Four Quartets:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

Opus 131 then becomes a key element in the dramatic structure of the film as the characters react to the news of Peter’s illness and rehearse for a concert that will include this piece.

The characters and the New York setting suggest that the territory of the film is close to that mapped so many times and so brilliantly by Woody Allen, but in its focus on classical music and mortality A Late Quartet is far closer to Michael Haneke’s award-winning Amour (2012) or Quartet (2012), Dustin Hoffman’s debut as a director set in a retirement home for musicians.

Here's the trailer: