The old adage ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme’ lies at the heart of Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling, in which four generations of life play out within the confines of a rural farmhouse in north Germany. Over the course of a century Schilinski flickers between the lives of Alma (Hanna Heckt), Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), charting their young lives at the turn of the century, the midst of the Second World War, the German Democratic Republic during the 1980s and the present country respectively. Between childhood games and the first blush of romantic feeling, political upheaval creeps in, as well as the recurring weight of gendered sexualisation and the aimlessness of growing up without certain ambition.
Fabian Gamper’s cinematography provides some atmospheric gravitas, drifting and dreamlike – comparisons to Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides or Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock are extremely tempting, but not quite on the mark, as Schilinski and co-writer Louise Peter aim for something stranger and somatic, honing in on the tensions that begin to blossom as a little girl becomes a young woman, and vague impressions and understandings become clearer and more fixed. The gauzy qualities of Gamper’s work also complement the film’s opaqueness, withholding even as it lets us peer in through the farmhouse windows and observe the quartet of women’s private moments.
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This wilful obfuscation may frustrate some viewers – Schilinski seems entirely disinterested in making Sound of Falling easy to decode – but perhaps its mysteries and half-truths reflect the reality of our lives in relation to those that were lived on the very same land years before. We can never truly understand the past, and perhaps never really understand each other with total clarity. Instead kinship is a feeling that is struck through shared emotions and parallel experiences. The deep specificity of Schilinski’s four protagonists does not prevent them from becoming avatars for a more universal female experience, and the question of the history that exists within the four walls we call home is compelling in its familiarity.
Where a film such as Robert Zemeckis’ Here approaches a similar conceit with a trite wash of sentimentality and a cinematic gimmick, Sound of Falling opts for ambition and total trust in its audience, even during moments of knowing withholding. It is a complex puzzle box, powered by the sensory and sensual, and a strong statement of intent from a bright spark in the German filmmaking scene.
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