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The remarkable German picture “Sound of Falling” initiates with a young woman, Erika (Lea Drinda), limping along a corridor on one leg and a set of supports. It requires a moment to understand she isn’t disabled; a length of cord holds her left leg up out of view. The supports are her Uncle Fritz’s (Martin Rother), a person who has undergone amputation, sleeping in his room when she quietly enters to replace them. In reality, he’s only faking sleep: although his eyes are shut, he’s certainly conscious as she nears his bed, examines his bare torso, and caresses his belly button. From these initial instances, the movie is broken up by instances of youthful interest—regarding the unusual qualities of one’s own form, and the banned sensation of another’s—along with malicious games of cleverness and trickery. Afterward, two sisters chuckle while fastening an employee’s unattended shoes to the ground. One woman, setting out on an errand, discovers her spouse has somehow jammed her car between a couple of trees—a nasty prank, specifically on her birthday.
The Berlin-based director Mascha Schilinski, who co-wrote the script alongside Louise Peter, is somewhat of a trickster herself. It has been a while since I have witnessed a filmmaker employ their craft with such an imaginative and dedicated sense of playfulness. “Sound of Falling,” recipient of a Jury Prize in Cannes, and Germany’s entry for Best International Feature at the Academy Awards, both perplexes and absorbs; it throws you off balance, then raises you up again. During an opening scene, Alma (Hanna Heckt), a little girl displaying light blond braids, cheers and scurries alongside her sisters from chamber to chamber. The lens takes part in the pursuit, chasing after them in one sustained shot—and then, without a cut, situates Alma, and the viewers, in a totally separate setting. Her companions are gone, and the residence becomes unnervingly serene. Alma observes through a peephole and sees her mother (Susanne Wuest) positioned before a lighted shrine dedicated to the family’s deceased. We are wandering in a puzzle of time and recollection, and the storytelling beneath our feet becomes frighteningly fragile. Quickly, the unburdened delight of children at play can turn into the serious stillness of tragedy.
Alma resides in a vast, deep farmhouse in northern Germany, which serves as both a hider’s field of dreams and a voyeur’s enjoyment. Entrances constantly remain partially open; each peephole provides an opportunity to pry. The lens, operated by the cinematographer Fabian Gamper, constantly moves; it looks through fissures, races through corridors, drifts through a barn, and, through occasional dreamlike interruptions, recreates the pale tones and hazy textures of old familial videos. The film never wanders beyond the house and its neighboring areas—its farthest point being a nearby river, where characters sometimes picnic and go for a swim.
The greatest distances within “Sound of Falling” are not physical, but temporal. Schilinski transitions freely from one timeframe to another, unannounced and without illustrative information. We decipher the film’s timeline by way of visual cues: faces turn into anchoring features, together with clothing and production details. Alma, who is coming of age around the turn of the twentieth century, illuminates her path at nighttime with candles. Erika, using a kerosene light, is living through the nineteen-forties. Eventually, we notice that Erika and Alma are related, even though they never appear within the same scene; the key link between them involves Fritz, Alma’s older brother (portrayed in youth by Filip Schnack). Largely quiet and on the edges, Fritz is stuck in his room in Erika’s narrative, yet from Alma’s view we observe how he initially loses his limb: their parents intentionally disabled him, in order to prevent his conscription during the initial World War.
Many years later, during the eighties, we encounter Erika’s niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a dark-haired adolescent donning glasses, maturing within the German Democratic Republic. She takes longing glances toward the river—West Germany and an alternate way of life lies just beyond it. Angelika gives off a sophisticated sexual awareness, and realizes the disturbing looks she receives from her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann), despite seeming unknowing. “I typically pretended not to notice how they looked at me,” Angelika states, in voice-over. “Though it was actually me who was secretly watching them looking at me.” Her contemporary equivalent, a girl named Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), quickly learns to follow suit in the face of male interest.
There exists strength in unspoken awareness, Schilinski implies, and the acting out of innocence and artlessness by a young woman might prove to be a tool of subversion. However, the picture doesn’t descend into a blandly generic trap; it understands each period retains unique horrors. Little Alma is the one who explains, with alarming lack of comprehension, her family’s standard practice of sterilizing hired help: a maid, she relays, was briefly sent away to be “made safe for the men.” Infrequently, a voice from one chapter comments on happenings from another. Angelika notes that following the conclusion of the Second World War, many young women akin to Erika walked toward the river to drown. “They feared what might come more than they feared death,” she explains. “Sound of Falling” concerns, in part, how tragedies and traumas echo throughout generations. Over the passage of a century, the premature demises of no less than three young women are documented; a fourth goes missing and never resurfaces. Sexual mistreatment stands as a quietly accepted plague. Characters dream of running, of escaping, of becoming something other than who they are.
These are grim subjects, deployed for a potentially deterministic argument: you might tremble at contemplating what a director such as Michael Haneke, an expert of disciplinary art-house formalism, could have accomplished with similar characters and themes. (Alma’s mother, solemn and rigorously styled, could have been extracted straight from “The White Ribbon,” Haneke’s frigid picture of a northern German village during the prelude to the initial World War.) Schilinski heads in a different direction, with a counterbalancing lightness of touch. As if she wished to bypass the typical cinematic depictions of violence, which presently yield only a numbed apathy, and to imply the habitual mistreatment of women while avoiding its portrayal onscreen. By teaching us how to find our way moment by moment, she arouses the viewer’s mind into an elevated condition of attentiveness and emotion. It is an insightful intuition—and “Sound of Falling,” considering its elaborate premeditation, feels thoroughly spontaneous.
The German title of Schilinski’s film is “In die Sonne schauen,” translating to “Looking Into the Sun.” It’s a title absent of simple explanation, although it triggered a memory of a scene where Angelika tries encouraging her mother, Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading), to identify her blind spot—a physical task possessing a clear metaphorical use. Irm stands as an anxious, insecure, frightened woman, and Geisler-Bading contributes the film’s most delicately heartbreaking depiction; her character perpetually seems out of sync with the world, unable to see beyond her personal misery. By contrast, Angelika proves perceptive enough to articulate this condition: “You only ever see others from the outside, but never yourself.”
The English-language title offers additional enigma. Inside one scene, when a young girl suffers a deadly fall from a hayloft, sound totally ceases. Does the sound from falling merely equate to silence? The phrasing calls to mind the well-known puzzle concerning a tree falling in the woodland; does the occurrence produce sound if no one happens to be close enough to hear? The film may present a different version of the identical query: Can we experience the happiness, sadness, bewilderment, and distress endured by those preceding us, even if they existed before us? Could our personal sentiments truly represent the psychic leftovers of those distant incidents?
Perhaps this accounts for why “Sound of Falling” so often resembles a ghost tale—the reason why the farmhouse feels so permanently haunted, and the lens seemingly glides through rooms and periods exhibiting the airy elegance of a specter. Schilinski emphasizes the spookiness. Her film delves fearlessly into mortality, and she asks us to observe, on multiple occasions, the countenances and bodies of the deceased. The director appears particularly captivated by the early twentieth century’s farewell traditions, laden with religion and superstition. Rocks are placed atop a departed great-grandmother’s eyes, helping her prompt passage through the afterlife. Alma’s elder sister Lia (Greta Krämer), dying much too soon, undergoes the process of having her eyes sewn open—then is positioned, upright, to be featured within a family shot.
Our current period has become so over-inundated with visual media that it feels somewhat shocking to be reminded of an age where the significance of such images—of physical proof to prove that one’s loved ones existed—could hardly be deemed for granted. Alma cannot get over one photograph specifically: a portrait of another late sister, who passed before Alma’s arrival. She also held the name Alma, and they share an incredible physical likeness. Could they embody, in reality, the same soul, one that now has passed through two separate figures? Schilinski, remaining a trickster, doesn’t clarify. However, even her more mischievous notions are supported through a fundamental belief, a belief in art’s capacity to awaken the deceased. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
