Zoe: We kind of took a break last week in that we didn’t post anything. We still saw a movie, two actually, but I had the grand idea to film us reviewing the movies. It was bad, and by bad I mean forty minutes long and highly un-editable. I was going to transcribe it and put that up but I’m lazy and have soul-sucking projects due at work so just ended up watching a marathon of Ghost Hunters instead. I will try to do it this weekend but I make no promises.
Scotty: One day, if this blog takes off, we might put up that video for all to see, and we’ll have a good laugh. But, for now, it is going into the vault.
Will we release it every seven years?
No, we’re not mouse sized cicadas.
We decided to get all highbrow this week and went to a French film festival movie.
I was secretly hoping that going to see a movie in a film festival would be glamorous or at least filled with hipsters. The reality was that we were the youngest people there. I guess that’s what happens when you go to a 6:30 showing on a Tuesday.
Somebody won a bottle of wine. That’s sort of glamorous.
And people in the back kept on complaining that they couldn’t hear the announcer because the microphone wasn’t loud enough (it totally was). Plus, I didn’t win the tote bag in the raffle. I really wanted that tote bag.
I think that it says a lot about us that we went to go see a period movie although we both don’t remember why we picked Mozart's Sister over Young Goethe in Love.
I wanted to see Young Goethe in Love, but you vetoed it because you wanted to see Mozart’s Sister more.
No, I wanted to see both of them. You picked Mozart’s Sister!
No, I remember specifically saying that I wanted to see Young Goethe, and you convincing me other wise. I mean, German Shakespeare in Love, if someone didn’t die I would be thoroughly disappointed in the Germanic peoples.
And you know if it’s a German movie, there’s going to be at least one naked guy running around.
So, why wouldn’t I want to see it?
8:45 on a Wednesday. We can still go see it.
OK, then we shall.
We have now written over a page without actually talking about the movie we saw, so in case you couldn’t tell, Mozart’s Sister wasn’t really that memorable. It’s about, surprise surprise, Mozart’s older sister Nannerl who performs with her talented brother around Europe. But as she’s getting up there in years (fourteen, gasp), she needs to start behaving like a woman. Women don’t play the violin or compose and are subservient so she totally should too. The movie spends the whole time in France so along the way she befriends one of the king’s daughters and the angstiest dauphin who I swear took staring lessons from Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Henry VIII. And it’s really hard to remember all of the movie’s plot points because the whole movie was pretty flat.
I thought the movie was very good. It just wasn’t that cinematic. It’s the type that would work just as well, if not better, on the small screen than the silver screen. This movie had a very intimate feel, and it was almost as if you were in the room with the characters, listening to their conversations. There are no grand establishing shots, very little noticeable score except for what is played by people in scene. And it worked; the director’s intent totally pulled though. It’s just that this film strayed away from so many movie conventions that it didn’t feel like a movie.
It’s like the movie was trying its best to not look like a movie. The movie also lacked some emotional peaks and valleys as well as an antagonist, although you could probably argue that she is her own antagonist. The editing was very fluid and panned from character to character more often than it cut.
However, the lack of the emotional rollercoaster that we’re used to in western storytelling lends itself to the realistic feel of Mozart’s Sister. If real life were all like movies, we would all be bipolar.
Also, there’s a scene when you see the titular character pee on the side of the road. I always wondered how women did that back then.
Really? I could have told you that.
I was not a very good girl scout.
Anyways, the one downside to this whole style is that every once in a while, the director would go and break it with a freaking zoom. I don’t like zooms in general, but in this case it was such a deviation from the style of the rest of the movie for seemingly no reason. Totally took me out of the movie every time he did it.
She ranted about it after the film. I totally didn’t notice it.
I hate zooms. It’s like the star wipe of cinema.
Enough about cinematography, on to the acting!
::Star Wipe::
The acting in this film also added to its realistic feel. It was very subdued and not too dramatic. The best part of this acting style is that it helped avoid one of the major pitfalls of making a film where the main character is an adolescent: crappy acting. The person who played Nannerl, Marie Ferét, did an outstanding job, as far as I could tell. I am not that familiar with the French language.
I know. You can’t hear it, but she keeps putting a t on the end of dauphin and her name is pronounced NA-nair (with a soft r) not na-na-rel.
It’s not my fault that the French phonetic system is so messed up. This is why I studied Spanish. En español, las letras dice un sonido todos las veces.
Il ya un poisson dans ta poche. The one French sentence I can really remember.
*sigh*
Speaking of French. I cannot emphasize enough the importance of readable subtitles in a movie. If you must have white subtitles, outline them or something. White subtitles on white snow makes Zoe very annoyed. Also, they randomly didn’t subtitle a scene. Nannerl gets very sick and we think her father is talking to a group of men about arrangements in case she dies. BUT THEY DON’T TRANSLATE IT! Way to defuse the tension movie.
Yay! Indie films!
Anyways, one thing we need to talk about before we go, just because we are both graduates of liberal colleges...FEMINISM! Did this pass the Bechdel test? Yes. Also, I found this to be a great feminist film because it ignored the conventions of a typical “feminist film” where the plucky female character fights against the establishment to achieve her dreams. This film was different in that it portrayed the uncomfortable truth that it was sucky to be a woman who had even the slightest ambition and most of the time, they couldn’t do anything about it.
Pretty clothes do not make up for lack of political rights.
Finally, we’re going to rate this movie with stars because the movie organizers gave us a piece of paper and told us we had to. We agreed too, both gave it four out of five stars.
So, we're gonna end this review here because this article is already way too long and we don't want to take up any of your/our valuable Facebook time.
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