Cannes takes a day to settle in, using the opening night to hear from the jury (led this year by one of our best actresses in Juliette Binoche), present a restored classic (the timeless “The Gold Rush”) and launch only one out-of-competition film (this year’s mediocre “Leave One Day”). Day 2 is when the train really leaves the station, premiering films all over the city, including competition titles vying for the Palme.
The first such title this year was Mascha Schilinski’s ambitious “Sound of Falling,” a film that unfolds across a century on one German farm, a setting haunted by personal and political histories, one of those places where one can look down halls or into rooms and imagine the lives that existed in them across generations. Schilinski has made a challenging film that chronologically jumbles four interconnected protagonists at this powerful location. In this place, one can almost feel how the air is heavier, filled with reminders of deaths past and omens of deaths to come.
It’s a somber film that can be frustrating while watching but has already grown on me in memory overnight, a work that’s intentionally haunting, more a collection of images and ideas designed to take up residence in your mind than a traditional narrative. To that end, it’s a compelling drama, a tone-setter for a festival that I expect to present works that require the viewer to meet them halfway and engage actively instead of passively digesting.
“Sound of Falling” takes place in the Altmark region of Germany between Berlin and Hamburg, a place defined by war and division, bordered by the river Elbe, a crucial location in WWII and border between East and West Germany. In this haunted place, Schlinski sketches core memories in the lives of four young girls: Alma (Hanna Heckt) in the early 20th century, Erika (Lea Drinda) in the 1940s during the war, Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky) in the 1980s, and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) today.
As the film starts, Alma is obsessed with a death photo of her deceased sister, a practice common to the time of taking photos of people after they have passed. “Sound of Falling” often feels like a “death photo” itself, a look into the past at people surrounded by loss, grief, and pain. Mortality is only one of the themes that connects Schilinski’s sprawling script, as she also often highlights the varying but always difficult paths for women in these four time periods. Violence hides around every corner, and it’s usually at the hands of men. With co-writer Louise Peter, Schilinski connects people who never interacted with threads of human need and identity, characters trying to define themselves in a world that often sees them as nothing more than servants and sexual partners.
It’s almost startling when “Sound of Falling” first jumps from Alma’s story into an unrelated group of characters in the same location. There are no title cards to give viewers a marker to get their bearings, and the chronological jumbling continues as the film cycles back from Lenka’s story to Alma’s and then through the century again and again. It’s a decision that’s purposefully disorienting, and it sometimes hurts the film’s momentum.
The choice to avoid linear storytelling in favor of emotional beats that move us from one era to another is likely to be the film’s most divisive tactic. In the experience, the disorientation caused by it sometimes felt like a bug instead of a feature, but it’s that desire to make a film that plays more like memory that makes it haunting. When one looks into rooms in a place like this non-descript German farm, they don’t imagine the stories that still reside in its walls and floors in a traditional order, so why turn that sensation into a traditional narrative?
Whatever issues one may have with the storytelling approach to “Sound of Falling,” its technical achievements are undeniable. Schilinski and her D.P. Fabian Gamper move their camera around this space almost like Steven Soderbergh’s in “Presence,” gliding from room to room as if they’re a long-lost relative—the film eventually does this “ghost POV” explicitly, but it’s stronger when it’s woven into the aesthetic. The sound and production designs are also remarkable, keeping us trapped in this bleak production with little room to breathe.
There’s also a suffocating quality to Sven Bresser’s Critics Week debut “Reedland” as well, a film that makes “Sound of Falling” look fast-paced by comparison. Confidently made, Bresser’s film sometimes gets stuck in pregnant pauses that push through realism into affectation, but it’s an interesting production, one that seeks to capture the mental torture that unfolds when mundanity is punctured by fear.
Johan (Gerrit Knobbe, a real-life reed cutter who had never acted before) has a life of routine. The film opens with roughly ten minutes of dialogue-free scenes of Johan going about his existence, cutting down reeds in a Dutch field, gathering them, burning them, and going home. Filmed in the northern Netherlands, “Reedland” feels almost dream-like as Bresser often rests his static camera on shots of reeds blowing in the wind, seeming to go in multiple directions at the same time. The elements become a crucial element to the film’s design, whether it’s the wind, the crackling fires, or the pounding rain on a car.
Johan’s life changes when he finds the body of a dead girl in the reeds. The local authorities write it off shockingly quickly, pinning the blame on outsiders, but Johan becomes convinced that it was committed by one of their own. His obsession with solving the crime becomes refracted through his mounting fear for the safety of his granddaughter, Dana (Lois Reinders). It’s as if he’s the kind of man who had never considered her safety until he saw how fragile it could be.
Knobbe is fantastic, carrying the burden of a film light on dialogue and plot in his taciturn expression. When flashes of concern or even anger come through, it’s almost as if they surprise even him, emotions he didn’t know he could hold before now. When he looks at the young men in town now, people who might have committed this crime, he sees them in a way he never has, as if he’s finally emerged from the smoke of the reed fires that constantly envelop him. It’s an outstanding performance in a film that can sometimes feel too languid for its own good, but one that works as a memorable character study of a man who never considered himself worth studying before.
