Just out in Italy this weekend… Lezione 21. This is a British / Italian co-production that seems to have garnered absolutely no attention whatsoever internationally, despite a decent cast.
Here’s the Variety review:
When Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony preemed in 1824, a critic wrote that a whole new world had been revealed. Alas, the same can’t be said for “Lecture 21,” novelist Alessandro Baricco’s derivative helming debut. Plucking visual and narrative concepts from Peter Greenaway minus the intellectual rigor, Baricco (“Silk”) constructs a historical fairy tale around the symphony, tying it in with a fictional professor’s lecture debunking Beethoven’s masterpiece. Flawed, often confused reasoning calls into question whether the helmer himself believes his story. Still, with this subject and cast, culture vultures will tune in to PBS and Euro cable, the pic’s two likely outlets.
Evoking Henry Fielding, Baricco conjures up the improbably named professor Mondrian Killroy (John Hurt), famed for his lectures against “shockingly overestimated works of art.” Former student Martha (Leonor Watling) explains in a voiceover that the professor’s most celebrated talk was Lecture 21, in which Beethoven’s Ninth was revealed as old-fashioned, lacking in real beauty. She’s determined to reconstruct the lecture, using memories, notes and a brief videoclip from the classroom.
Woven into this frame is another imaginary character, early 19th-century violinist Hans Peters (Noah Taylor). In an odd cross between pseudo-Greenaway and Maurice Maeterlinck’s “The Blue Bird,” Hans is approached by a child, resembling a reject from a “Harry Potter” casting call, who leads him to Hoffmeister (Clive Russell) and a group of eccentrics (including Phyllida Law) keen on establishing the Ninth’s overrated credentials.
Helping out are talking-head witnesses, dressed in period clothing or, in some cases, completely unclothed except a wig; presumably, they are, literally, “the naked truth.” Between these witnesses and the eccentrics, Hans is shown how Beethoven’s age and deafness forced him to retreat into an old-fashioned style. All this was part of Killroy’s lecture, the full import of which is supposed to be revealed when Martha finds her ex-prof, but the only thing revealed by now is Baricco’s flawed reasoning.
In trying to argue the symphony was overrated, the helmer cherry-picks the elements he wants and discards the rest. Never mind the Ninth’s revolutionary elements, or the extraordinary body of work Beethoven composed in the 10 years leading up to 1824. Also questionable is the film’s damning portrait of old age.
The pic often appears to be pitched to children, especially in the overly deliberate way characters speak — some of the dialogue feels lifted from a poorly transcribed crib sheet of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.” However, artificially inserted swear words and pointless nudity preclude the younger set.
Visuals are kept deliberately theatrical, which can be striking in some scenes and simply overlit in others. Perhaps especially disappointing is the poor use of music; for real insight, auds would be better off listening to a recording of Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts.
Hardly expansive! Anyway, apart from Taylor (who seems to have a tase for the idiosyncratic, having used his marquere value following Shine to appear in the much more interesting likes of Simon Magus and The Proposition), there’s also John Hurt and Leonor Watling (who both appeared in The oxford Murders) and Rasmus Hardiker, a great young English character actor who specialises in dopey adolescents (he’s Jack Dee’s daughter’s boyfriend in Lead Balloon).