Musikk for bryllup og begravelser (Music for Weddings and Funerals, 2002)

Unni Straume

Norway

97 min, color, Swedish (English subtitles)

A very pleasant surprise and easily among the best films I saw at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Music for Weddings and Funerals is a thoughtful and optimistic exploration of the sources of creativity, the meaning of identity, and the implications of personal freedom. Ostensibly, it is the story of Sara (Lena Endre eerily resembling Jessica Lange) who has recently divorced Peter (Bjørn Floberg) following the death of their child. Sara has written a very personal book that everyone except her sees as a way of dealing with her grief. To her dismay, the private tragedy seems to have produced the inspiration that resulted in a best-seller.

One night, Peter, now married to the model Helen (Petronella Barker), shows up unexpectedly at the couple's former home. After criticizing her taste (or rather, lack of it) and her inability to appreciate the finer nuances of architectural concept and style, he tells her that he suspects he has a brain tumor. That very night Peter commits suicide, leaving the people who knew him and the rest of us to ponder his motives.

Soon Sara finds herself together with Kaja (Rebecka Hemse), a starry-eyed student and paramour of her unfaithful ex, and with Helen, pregnant with a second child. Each of them copes with Peter's death in her own way although they all share in the attempt to find an explanation and comfort in revealing bits and pieces of his private life.

The three women also have to deal with the disruptive yet not altogether unwelcomed presence of the Serbian musician Bogdan (Goran Bregovic) who rents the basement of Sara's house. His boisterous band of Serbian folk musicians brings a typically Balkan chaos and liveliness to contrast the stark minimalist architecture of the house. Their presence there is completely incongruous, not only because their revelries are sharply inconsistent with the solemn occasion of Peter's death, but because their attitude to life that celebrates with equal gusto happiness and pain is profoundly unsettling for the orderly, reticent, and subdued Western Gestalt. In fact, it is impossible to tell whether their merrymaking is ever free of strange sadness. At the same time, it is never morose either. It is as if they always acknowledge that life is full of pain and yet somehow worth living, and that in itself is happiness.

It would take Bogdan's very literal destruction of a wall to free Sara from her confinement where she suffers from her desire to conform to Peter's demanding personality and her own fear to experience the liberating sense of creativity urged by pain without guilt.

Very nicely photographed, the film juxtaposes the controlled and seemingly safe environment that is ultimately threatening in its inhumanity and sterility with the undisciplined (perhaps undisciplinable) but warmingly honest presence of the "intruders" that threatens with its potential to disturb the delicately fake balance of several Norwegian lives.

The Norwegian environment is best allegorized through the house itself. Although well-planned and meticulously crafted, it is cold and empty to Sara who constantly tries to decorate it with rather ornate and ugly objects just to make it less impersonal; it also the location, if not the cause, of her child's death and perhaps a contributor to Peter's for it serves as a constant reminder to him that his outward life devoted to preaching minimalism was fundamentally at odds with his secret petty greed for objects.

Sara's feeble attempts to enliven it, however, are still well within the confines of its massive cement walls. She decorates but never alters. She introduces slight "imperfections" in the straight lines yet never has the courage to remove the lines altogether. It is not until Bogdan does that for her that she finally realizes how easy it has been to escape all along. Yet somehow the weight of rules and expectations prevented her from doing just that.

Yet, for all that, the film tries a little bit too hard. It is overly didactic and it is quite predictable. There is little development of the story between Bogdan and Sara and we are sort of told by one of the other characters that he is in love with her, something that only in the end becomes clear. Her reaction is a bit surprising for we have no preparation for it whatsoever... except maybe that it was something she had been waiting for all along (and which presumably her tryst with the hotel boy could not provide).

There are some other annoyances too. Take the music, for example. Why was there so little of it? It was the central unifying element in the film and yet given Goran Bregovic's talents, he was badly underused here. There were other interesting themes not explored fruitfully at all. Take the complete mismatch and chaos in the music: these are Serbian musicians with three Bulgarian singers and belly-dancers. Not purely Serbian folk, nor Bulgarian, nor gypsy. Yet it somehow hung together. Why? There really should have been more emphasis on the unifying strength of music.

January 24, 2003