As if to quell any lingering gripes about an opening film that could be generously described as wafer-thin, organizers from this year’s Cannes Film Festival kicked off the Palme d’Or competition with a film of profuse (and maddening) complexity. Free-flowing and leaden, novelistic and allusive, dour and flowery, Mascha Schilinski’s “Sound of Falling” can take just about any adjective you want to dish, layering them all into a time-hopping mood board that follows four families, all living in the same German farmhouse over the course of a century.
Any attempt to diagram the kin links and plot turns that connect the four clans would give you a maze, which is just as well for a defiantly nonlinear uber-artfilm expressly designed as a labyrinth full of flourishes and dead-ends. Suffice it to say, “Sound of Falling” actively nurtures comparisons to “The Virgin Suicides” in tenor and tone – but only sometimes, because lesser-known director Mascha Schilinski (though she won’t be for much longer) has devised her breakout feature as a virtuoso showcase for her influences and talent.
That those twin strands of artistic influence and ambition are in some ways inseparable reflects Schilinski’s new arrival on the scene. For all its opacity, “Sound of Falling” is unambiguous about its creative inspirations, alchemizing visual and narrative motifs from Bergman, Tarkovsky, J. A. Bayona, Andrew Wyeth and the brothers Grimm into a form that Schilinski can call her own. That it helped this reviewer to piece through the film by making connections to other work reflects an experience that remains hard to pin down.
Let’s lay things out as best we can: Following an internal rhythm that only incrementally reveals itself, “Sound of Falling” ostensibly follows adolescent girls Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka in four discrete time frames spanning the early 20th Century to the day before yesterday. Though even here, the ensemble drama bucks its own structure, free-floating across each timeline to share the perspectives and inner-monologues of nearly all members of each extended family sharing this same farmhouse. That is to say, nearly every female member of the household, but for one telling exception, ultimately playing as a chorus of gendered angst.
The film suggests that it makes little difference who’s running the country at any given point in time: Whether under Wilhelm, Honecker or Merkel (or even incoming chancellor Merz, unless he makes some radical changes), evolving regimes and improving fashions have little bearing over the shame inscribed into girlhood as a rite-of-passage. Leers and louche behavior will always greet young girls on the cusp of violent maturity, while family secrets can work their way into a house’s very foundation.
Born under the Kaiser, young Alma (Hanna Heckt) is still working out her own place in her sprawling Lutheran clan. The family’s ample fertility derives more from pragmatism than affection, given a child mortality rate that decorates the farmhouse walls with photos of siblings Alma never knew. Alive under the Fuhrer, Erika (Lea Drinda) has a physical fascination for her old Uncle Fritz, an amputee whose leg was sacrificed – in roundabout way – to stave off any further familial grief for his and Alma’s poor parents.
Straddling the borders of East and West Germany, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) falls prey to her own uncle’s fascination, here of a more predatory variety. And finally, idling away the summer as her yuppie parents renovate their recently purchased farmhouse, Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) and her younger sister Nelly (Zoë Baier) begin the whole sordid cycle anew.
Schilinski jumps between time frames with an abandon that her many characters struggle to claim for themselves. For all the fun she has with cinematic language – playing with match-cuts and visual echoes and bravura long takes lit to resemble a Rembrandt painting – the filmmaker is equally constrained by a self-imposed tonal severity that casts this northern farmstead as a Teutonic closed circuit.
Elusive and allusive to intriguing ends, “Sound of Falling” also falters into a programmatic kind of fatalism that seems more redolent of the Serious Film an up-and-coming German auteur is “supposed” to make than the indefinable object she actually did. The film is layered all right – and to follow the one golden rule of fashion, it often behooves one to a to remove some covering before leaving the house.
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