CANNES – As experiential as it is cerebral, by turns contemplative and full of bluster, juxtaposing ethereal beauty with brutal violence — Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling” refuses to be pinned down. This mercurial quality sometimes feels like a sign of indecision; other times, it seems the result of unbridled ambition on the part of a young filmmaker. The hotly anticipated Cannes Competition contender is only Schilinski’s second feature, with her previous effort “Dark Blue Girl” (2017) made in her final year of film school. But for most of the engrossing 149 minutes of “Sound of Falling,” the sensation of standing on constantly, stubbornly shifting ground feels like an apt, movingly indignant counterpoint to the crushing stillness of the film’s four main protagonists, women of four different eras all writhing under the weight of social expectations and existential dread.
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7-year-old Alma (Hanna Heckt) is the youngest daughter of a relatively middle-class family living in a German farmhouse at the beginning of the 20th century. She observes her world—one of candlelit rooms and golden haystacks, creaky floorboards and stiff garments—with the wide-eyed curiosity of a child as yet untouched by pain. But it isn’t long before her days, at first marked by mischievous play with her older sisters, become dotted with references to death. From observing unsettling post-mortem photographs, to participating in the staging of some, the young girl is in ever greater contact with the comings and goings of the Grim Reaper.
Or perhaps this impression is only illustrative of her own increasingly morbid psyche. Schilinski, who co-wrote the film with Louise Peter, captures reality as a fragmented collection of sensations and memories, rather than a linear series of facts. An old post-mortem picture of a young girl bearing a striking resemblance to Alma — her first explicit brush with death in the film — haunts the rest of her story. It hangs over her like a nagging, unspoken thought; when she finally asks her sisters about the girl in the picture, the silence around her words is electric.
Schilinski lets this disturbing photograph and other mysterious details remain partly unexplained, her female characters forging lives dominated by the unspoken. The facts of their existence emerge, or come into greater focus, mostly through their own whispered voice-overs, in thoughts and confessions that the girls are apparently unable to voice to anyone.
As the film furiously flits forwards and backwards in time, it becomes increasingly clear that more than blood, these women — all living at different times on the same farm — are united by bone-deep discomfort, loneliness, and shame. A teenager in the war-torn 1940s, Erika (Lea Drinda) is disobedient in a way girls her age were not able to be when Alma was growing up. But her fascination with her amputated uncle Fritz (Martin Rother) is out of the bonds of teenage rebellion, and the first of several troubling instances in the film where sex finds itself intertwined with pain.
This association initially feels facile, and “Sound of Falling” occasionally threatens to turn into a throwback to the cynical arthouse fare of not so long ago — those tiresomely provocative cocktails of sex and violence that are thankfully rarer today. But as the film goes on, the 20th and 21st centuries roll forward, and the complex psyches of the four girls unspool, those increasingly disturbing behaviors soon come across as often unconscious yet desperate reactions to a persistent patriarchy.
Rather than a mere kink, Erika’s curiosity about her uncle and his condition begins to look like an attempt to forge a different relationship to (male) power — even more so in light of the strange bond between the promiscuous Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) and her own creepy uncle, in the segments set in the German Democratic Republic of the 1980s. Aware of his perverted attention but sexually teasing him nonetheless, she courts pain, in reaction to something too intimately woven into the fabric of her life to be put into words. Wryly observing her nearly catatonic mother, her every action seems an act of revolt against — what exactly?
“Sound of Falling” is an intellectual puzzle even as it trades in bodily sensations and striking images — courtesy of director of photography Fabian Gamper — and its most recent segment offers a clue even as it deepens the mystery. The child Nelly (Zoë Baier) feels the same pull towards annihilation and death as Angelika, but the reasons for it are hazier. Her circumstances are thinly drawn: all we know is that she lives in the dilapidated farmhouse, which her parents are refurbishing. No strange psychosexual tensions appear to be at play, yet the child fantasizes about death. Could the family unit itself be the source of her deadly impulse? No clear answer is given, and Schilinski leaves enough of these loops open for “Sound of Falling” to linger in the mind.
For this writer, alternately haunted and annoyed by the intentionally opaque nature of the film, the source of all this viscerally felt despair appears to be hypocrisy. It is in the complicit silence of patriarchal families, where women always must keep quiet — like Alma’s mother, who tells her children that she loves them by blinking in their direction at supper. It is also in the convenient gaps of history books that ignore the extent of women’s suffering and expect them to carry on as normal. It isn’t hard from there to interpret “Sound of Falling” as a warning against Germany’s own selective memory. But for all its sprawling ambition, Schilinski’s sophomore feature is most effective and moving on a human scale. A dissociative film, it recreates the febrile sensation of a mind splintered by too many painful truths, which continue to linger in the body long after they’ve vanished from memory. [B+]
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