Okay, we don't just watch seemingly obscure films that you've never heard of. We also watch big films that hit the box office charts. But what's the point of my reviewing "American Gangster" or "The Departed," when you have probably seen them weeks or months before they make it beyond the anglophone world? Whereas if I do mini reviews of "Vier Minuten," or "Alexandra," or "Auf der anderen Seite," or "Tuya's Marriage," then you the reader get to put them on your must-see list and hope that they make it to an "art house" cinema near you one day. According to IMDB, "Vier Minuten" is scheduled for UK release in February 2008; no date for US release visible.
I won't try to list all the awards and nominations for "Vier Minuten," since IMDB does such a good job of it. In our estimation, the awards are justified, especially in the strong performances of the two female leads, Monica Bleibtreu and Hannah Herzsprung. The elderly Frau Kruger (Bleibtreu) seems to have been in the prison forever - at least since the days when it was a makeshift hospital during World War II - though she's not a prisoner (at least not in the juridical sense). She gives piano lessons to prisoners, a motley group of drugged-out, suicidal, violent misfits, probably motivated by nothing more than getting out of their cells for their keyboard drills.
Until Jenny (Herzprung) appears, that is. It's clear that she has a kind of virtuosity, though the severe looking Frau Kruger disapproves of Jenny's taste for "Negro Music." Indeed, Frau Kruger is timeless: her clothing, gray hair in a bun, utilitarian glasses, and taste for Schumann, all put her in a kind of time warp. It's not terribly important when or where the film takes place, though it has a gray industrial atmospheric look of 1980s (East?) Germany.
Frau Kruger knows that Jenny is special, and invests much - in fact, everything, including what's left of her career - in nurturing Jenny's talent. But it's no easy task, as Jenny has much to be angry about. She lashes out at everyone, and makes a couple of unfortunate enemies - usually a bad idea in prison. All the while, we get glimpses of Frau Kruger's youth, when another young woman is the object of her affections. Does modern-day Jenny remind the aging spinster of her youth?
Another thing that is not so important, but inevitably enters into web searches, categorizations, and pigeon-holing: "Vier Minuten" has been featured at Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals in Paris and Oslo. But you could probably also do a Google search for films about piano music, and "Four Minutes" would pop up too. Director Chris Kraus has a longstanding interest in music, the legacy of Nazism, and the gay world (he wrote "The Einstein of Sex... the story of Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, a German Jew, who as a physician established the field of sexology, and fought militantly against German anti-sodomy laws in the late 19th century, up to the rise of the Third Reich in the mid 1930s").
With a director as apt as Kraus, and a film with music at it core, you can expect a topnotch soundtrack. There is, of course, Frau Kruger's beloved Schumann, and Jenny's "Negro Music" (as Frau Kruger dismisses it) runs the gamut from North African rai to the heavy metal played by two lovable, bearlike ex-cons who help Frau Kruger move her piano around. If you liked the eclectic soundtrack of "Babel," you're sure to like the music in "Vier Minuten."
Photo source: Cinenews.be.