Overthinking the apocalypse

Some of my audience may not be familiar with arthouse movies. There's a tradition in cinema that doesn't follow the conventions set by Hollywood, or other big-budget productions like Bollywood or Hong Hong cinema. The movies they make tend to be slower and not so engaging, no hooks or chekov guns, requiring the audience to actively pay attention. They are not so bound by the demands of studios and focus groups, so the directors get a lot more freedom, sometimes too much. Such movies play in small, state-subsidised theatres and movie festivals around the world. It's quite an international scene; going to the little cult theatres of Curitiba in the 2000s, always mostly empty save for a few hipsters like us and ever-present retired elders, I would watch stuff from France, Korea, Angola, Turkey indifferently. This is also where you get to watch most of your countries' own auteurs.

In my phase where I'm learning music, I catch myself every so often remembering Tônica Dominante (2001). I think I'll rewatch it. It wasn't a big success, even for arthouse-movie standards. Many critics panned it. It currently sits at 3.1 stars on adorocinema.com . It's a movie about music, about the impossible inflexibility of the perfection it demands, and I guess many people found it gimmicky, the structure too obvious and cheap: three days, each day a musical movement, like a sonata; each movement colour-keyed graphically, to varying success of photography. It's not particularly engaging or especially philosophical. But something about it stayed with me all these years, whereas I fully forgot the plot or even the title of most Cannes Festival winners I watched in that cinema-rich period of my life.

At this point I only remember flashes of the movie, of course. The relentlessness of the music teacher, a strict elderly lady representing the impossible high bar of art. The protagonist musician crushing on the virtuoso player but too unskilled to even play in the same league as the big kids, forced to work as a page-turner to even be close to the high-level relationship between the virtuoso and the strict teacher—another transparent metaphor about the musical experience. This one absolutely heartbreaking scene where the big day comes and on stage the protagonist panics and fails to turn the pages at the right time and spirals and it gets worse and worse, and the pianist plays wrong before the audience and it's all his fault, under the unflinching gaze of the teacher and the crush, of the art and the beauty he longs for and—that's not actually the heartbreaking part, that's not where the movie gets cruel; the cruelty is when the piece is over and audience applauds. Everyone oppressively smiling, overjoyed. a standing ovation. He messed up before the gaze of art, the music was wrong and it's his fault, and nobody was able to even understand what happened. The loneliness that is, to crash against that wall.

Now in the age of excess of information, I can read stuff about the movie, to learn the lore that I never knew. I did infer that the director must have been a musician—that much is self-evident—but not that this was Lina Chamie's first movie. I did not know that the movie struggled with a shoestring budget, that she had to creatively find ways to work with cheaper ways to do cuts and whatnot. I didn't know that the lead actor had an accident mid-recording that left him in a coma and subsequently with partial memory loss, interrupting the production, nor that his recovery was in part helped by the director herself, giving him therapeutic clarinet classes.

Wait, clarinet? Yeah. I did not know Lina Chamie, who made an entire movie about how impossibly demanding music can be, a movie that got stuck on my brain for years—Lina Chamie is a flautist.