Director: Sigrid Faltin (Germany). Year of Release: 2023
Anne-Sophie Mutter is taking director Sigrid Faltin and her cameraman hiking through the Bavarian mountains. Mutter says they won’t be walking as far as she wanted as they’ll be accompanied by her little dog. Nonetheless, although Mutter will be 60 this year, she walks at quite a pace, leaving director and cameraman lagging behind. She is friendly, chatty, and much more down-to-earth than you’d necessarily expect from a virtuoso violinist.
Faltin asks Mutter if there’s anything she’d rather not talk about. At first she can’t think of anything, but then says that she doesn’t like the way in which celebrity intrudes into people’s private lives. Having said that, she says she’d have no problems talking about the secret lovers hiding beneath her bed. She seems to have more problems with celebrity gossip being boring than being particularly precious about her life.
Mutter seems to have an awkward relationship with her celebrity. At one stage she gets irate at newspaper reports which are scandalized by her wearing a shoulderless dress, but then say nothing about her performance. They wouldn’t say the same about a male musician’s tuxedo, would they? But after this very valid point, we have what must be 5 minutes of footage of Mutter playing in different dresses while various commentators say how great she looks.
Mutter was a gifted violinist from a very early age. At first her parents made her play piano, as there was another kid in the neighbourhood who played violin and it sounded awful. We see footage of her at 10, playing while her brother accompanies her on piano. They are both breath-takingly good. At 13, she was discovered by Herbert von Karajan. Although she was told to wait one year, she practised, returned, and he helped her become a sensation.
Her parents enrolled her for private home tutoring so that she could keep up with her practise. This meant that she had little contact with people her own age and few friends. She says that this was not a great problem, as she had her 2 older brothers. This is presented as supportive parenting rather than an option that is not open to most kids who don’t have a grand piano at home. But Mutter is so affable that you find it hard to begrudge her her privileged upbringing.
The young Mutter showed the self-confidence that is generally peculiar to rich kids. We see her being interviewed while still a teenager. The interviewer asks her what she’s have done if her bid to become a successful violinist did not work. Her answer: “it was going to work, quite clearly. If it wasn’t successful, I don’t know. But why shouldn’t it have worked?” It says something about the likeability of young Mutter, that we don’t find this precocity objectionable.
Over the years, Mutter has gained a number of famous friends. Part of the film consists of her sitting in front of an Alp in a dirndl answering Faltin’s questions, but most scenes are of Mutter interchanging with her famous friends – Daniel Barenboim, John Williams, the magician Steve Cohen (no, me neither), Roger Federer and her second husband André Previn. For English speakers, used to something else, it is a surprize to see the last 2 speaking fluent German.
The film contains a number of interesting individual scenes – Mutter has an engaging personality, and in particular her discussions with the other musicians show a mutual understanding and appreciation of their craft. Mutter tells Barenboim how much in awe she is of his conducting skills, before letting slip that the one time she tried it herself – at a charity event when the main conductor had fallen ill, she showed enough talent to consider doing this more often.
Footage of old concerts are equally impressive. Accompanied by von Karajan, Previn and others, Mutter shows a precocious talent playing pieces that I should know but I’m just too uncultured. I did recognise Paganini, but largely because though of us who are South Bank Show age remember Andrew Lloyd Webber’s version. While there are people better placed than me to authenticate the music’s quality, it’s good enough for a philistine like me.
And yet, for all the moments of individual greatness, this is a film which is never the sum of its parts. Federer is as bland as you’d expect, although you wouldn’t notice this from the reaction of Mutter and her tennis crazy son who are sitting opposite. There’s no reason why we should expect Federer to speak knowledgeably about music (in an early scene he looks at a violin quizzically and holds it like a tennis racquet) but it was a dubious editorial decision to include him.
The film also suffers from a certain lack of structure. Mutter’s story is told in a roughly chronological order, but not really. She looks slightly different in some footage – less chubby and with lighter hair – but then we go back to watching her perform as a kid. Although we swap between the different celebrity interviewers, there seems to be little attempt to cluster her ideas about certain issues – we just jump from one thing to another.
The one occasion where we get a sense of internal coherence is when Mutter begins talking about politics. Starting with a reference to her role models (Pippi Longstocking as a child, Greta Thunberg now), she talks about an app which offsets her carbon emissions and playing benefit concerts for Yemen and Ukraine. It all seems simultaneously laudable and inadequate – especially when she’s saying it from Federer’s opulent front room.
All of this must be caveated with the acknowledgement that I am not the film’s target audience. There must be a certain generation of Germans for whom Mutter is a phenomenon, and who will be moved by this insight into her life, And she certainly seems to be more interesting than many of her fellow celebrities. Yet, as someone who never really knew her, and had little need to know more, it didn’t quite move me. But bits of it were great.
CinePhil 