Music lovers take note: German director Chris Kraus's second feature is a stirringly scored, refreshingly unsentimental drama about an elderly, hardened piano teacher at a women's prison and the brilliant but deeply troubled inmate she tries to mentor.
Grim-faced, octogenarian pianist Frau Traude Kruger (Monica Bleibtreu) has, like Tosca, "devoted her life to beauty alone," caring only for the company of Mozart, Schumann, Beethoven and the rest. Frau Kruger is entirely dedicated to her work at a women's penitentiary in Germany, not because she cares for people but because she feels an obligation to the music. In addition to playing the organ during prison church services, Frau Kruger offers piano lessons to inmates and with her budget slashed by warden Meyerbeer (Stefan Kurt) and the prison board, much of the cost comes from her own pocket. Of 500 inmates, only four have signed up for lessons; portly, music loving guard Mutze (Sven Pippig) brings the student-body head count to five. None show any particular promise, with the exception of Jenny von Loben (the astonishing Hannah Herzsprung), an unruly new arrival whom Frau Kruger notices expertly fingering an imaginary keyboard while listening to Mozart's Sonata in A Major. Frau Kruger's first lesson with Jenny doesn't go well -- she's dirty and insolent -- and when Frau Kruger asks Mutze to expel her, Jenny explodes in a violent rage. When it's over, Mutze lies in a bloody, broken heap as Jenny pounds away on the piano. Even through the horror of the moment, Frau Kroeger can hear raw, unbridled genius (though she plays the jazzy, uptempo "noise" Frau Kroger hatefully dismisses as "Negro music"). Mutze is hospitalized and Jenny is placed in four-point restraints, but Frau Kruger feels obligated to persevere. She convinces the prison board to allow Jenny to enter a recital contest for up-and-coming musicians under 21; should she win, she explains, Jenny would bring honor and great press to the prison and vain Warden Meyerbeer. But the board isn't alone in needing convincing: Jenny at first wants nothing to do with contests and appears indifferent to her talent, perhaps because her father pushed her to become a child prodigy. When she stopped playing at age 12, he began sexually abusing her. Frau Kruger explains this isn't a mercy mission: She's only interested in the music and tells Jenny it's her obligation to foster her talent. Jenny finally agrees and her success in the competition's early rounds brings exactly the positive publicity Frau Kroeger predicted. But this isn't AUGUST RUSH and Jenny isn't a loveable scamp: She's a convicted killer with deep-rooted emotional problems, as well as enemies inside the prison who would love to see her fail.
As Jenny's story unfolds, so does Frau Kroeger's. In flashback we see her work as a Wehrmacht hospital nurse in the same building that now houses the prison, and the tragic romance that froze her heart. Neither Jenny nor Frau Kruger is particularly loveable and we're not asked to like them very much, only understand them a little more. That's part of this unique movie's uncompromising approach: For better or worse, everyone remains true to character and there are no sudden 11th hour conversions, although those final four minutes onstage, during which Jenny destroys everything she worked for while creating something utterly new, are fairly miraculous. leave a comment --Ken Fox
