The Music Teacher (1988)

Yes, this is a movie for opera lovers. Yes, maybe other persons will be bored. But, anyway, IT IS A REAL JEWEL. Excellent music, lovely photographed scenes, charming performances... From the beginning to the end, this film deserves an undoubted adjective: BEAUTIFUL. José Van Dam is an excellent bass-baritone and one of the wold's most famous singer. Although his students (Anne Roussel as Sophie Maurier and Philippe Volter as Jean Nilson) had small timing faults during their performance in Sempre libera, whose voices were doubled by Dinah Bryant, soprano, and Jerome Pruett, tenor, their acting are so tender that you can forgive these minor troubles. The last Dallayrac scene is delicate, sublime and superb. A Gerard Corbiau masterpiece, indeed. I haven't seen Pelle, the conqueror yet, but it should be something, because Pelle defeated Le maitre de musique and Almodovar's masterpiece: Womans in the verge of a nervous breakdown and won the Oscar for a foreing language movie in 1989.

As a dark horse, this Belgian film surprisingly got an Oscar nomination for BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM in 2009, directed by Gerard Corbiau, whom maybe we feel more familiar with for his later work FARINELLI (1994), another music-related opus, with a more dramatic pathos within. Ominously the music itself steals the thunder of the film per se, which leaves it in an awkward position, where only genuine opera lovers could rigorously indulge themselves with it while for laypeople like me, the waning correlation is unavoidable and discouraging. The film stars a real maestro José van Dam (the celebrated Belgian bass-baritone) as a singer, who is compelled to retire in his middle-age by his arch enemy, the Duke, with the help of his loyal wife, he trains two disciples and finally get his vengeance over the Duke. However Mr. van Dam's stiff performance could not be excused as a stark novice stage-fright; two young leads Anne Roussel and Philippe Volter also fail to be impressive apart from their singing parts. By contrast, only Sylvie Fennec and Patrick Bauchau deliver some sincere acting skills without too much superficial showing-off. The setting, costume and all its delicate props are in their right places to exude a bourgeois sentiment which casually goes well with the film's uneventful narrative. The final showdown is a fleeting opera duel between two respective disciples from the maestro and the Duke. The mask tableau is a major attraction, too bad it just ends like that, without too much aftertaste. After all, one cannot complain more about this film as long as music save us all from this molecularly mundane world.

The kind of film that earns "European films" the bad rap and bad rep the get from a lot of people these days. I had the feeling the film was written to showcase the music, not vice versa. And since you can't write a terribly compelling film about training vocalists, we're trapped into watching seemingly endless camera pans of trees, birds in them chirping ad nauseum, pseudo-profound, meaningful stares between people who have nothing to say to each other, and a Mahler symphony on the sound track that just simply won't go away. A terribly tedious film.

It is a rare feat to have a movie plot and music so complementary and interwoven. Great actors. Outstanding choice of music pieces. Great performers. It is difficult not to be fascinated by this movie. A must see and see again. Mahler's lieders will become forever unforgettable.