Earlier this afternoon I suffered through most of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, and I want credit, dammit, for toughing it out for just short of two hours. (It runs 149 minutes.)
A hellish, multi-chapter, visually dreary, narrative hop-around from the perspective of a few suffering women and young girls at different times during the 20th Century, Sound of Falling brings the grim and the soul-drain in the usual suffocating ways.
You could say that the soft, muddy, under-lighted cinematography is meant to inject the same shitty, misery-pit, lemme-outta-here feeling the women and girls are experiencing at every turn. Sure, I’ll buy that.
Is Schilinski an auteur — a feisty, willful, go-for-it filmmaker with a persistence of artistic vision and a stylistic stamp all her own (albeit a stamp that brings you down, down, down)? Yes, she is that.
Does her film have something to say? You’d better believe it. It’s saying that 20th Century farm women in northern Germany were miserable as fuck, and that the men were either smelly pigs or abusers or both, and that most of them smoked and a few had massive pot bellies.
Sound of Falling doesn’t make you think about dying before your time, but it does prompt thoughts of escape early on.
On top of which I was sitting in the Grand Lumière balcony, scrunched between two women and with no leg room at all, and my thighs and calves were stuck in a kind of purgatory, suspended between numbness and screaming pain.
But I didn’t leave for the longest time. I wanted to but I couldn’t be the first balcony-sitter to bail. I said this to myself — “no quitting until a couple of viewers go first”.
So I hung in there with the patience of Job, waiting for some intrepid soul to man up and bolt the fuck outta there, but nobody did for the first…oh, 100 minutes or so.
And then a woman got up and walked. And then another. Thank you, sisters, and thank you, my sweet Lord…glory be to God!
I stood up with my bag and retreated to the main walkway, and then decided to watch from a standing position. And then another person threw in the towel. And then another. And then a trio of Zoomers left at the same time. Hey, we’re really livin’ here!!!
I’ve never felt such wonderful kinship with strangers as I did at that moment.
Variety’s Guy Lodge, the bespectacled king of the Cannes filmcrit dweebs, has totally raved about Schilinski’s punisher.
I respect Lodge’s willingness to drop to his knees and kowtow to a feminist filmmaker who has the chutzpah to subject viewers to a drip-drip gloom virus, but at the same time I think he’s either left the planet or had simply decided to praise this fairly infuriating film no matter what.
Average Joes and Janes, trust me, are going to hate, hate, hate this exactingly assembled, artistically pulverizing tour de force.
