Title: Mozart’s Sister (Nannerl, la soeur de Mozart)

Opens: August 19, 2011

When Milos Forman’s “Amadeus” was released in 1984, a fictionalized look at Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, it quickly became revered by cognoscenti as the most exciting film ever to depict the life and work of a European composer. “Amadeus” had everything-costumes, a full range of Mozart’s actual compositions, a humor-filled, sometimes melodramatic biopic situated in the world of Austrian nobility. Wolfgang’s sister, nicknamed Nannerl or Nana, was barely mentioned. Now, Rene Feret fills in the blanks in our knowledge by a likewise fictionalized look, this time at a woman on the cusp of adulthood at the age of fourteen. Perhaps it’s setting the bar too high to expect “Mozart’s Sister” to compare qualitatively or quantitatively to the higher-budgeted “Amadeus,” but having seen Forman’s masterpiece, one cannot help judging Feret’s writing, directing, and producing a film about an Eighteenth Century family of musical prodigies as wanting. Perhaps we’d be fairer to think that “Amadeus” was marketed primarily to the tastes of an American audience but “Mozart’s Sister” would stand well with European cinephiles.

In fact, given that Feret comes across as a showman who has so much to do with this film, it’s interesting to note that he has cast several members of his own family-as the title character, as Louise de France, as Maître de Musique Abbaye, his wife as editor, Fabienne Feret, and himself as the professor of music-conveying almost the sense that this is a vanity project.

“Mozart’s Sister” is completely lacking in humor, proceeds in an adagio pace when some allegro vivace would be in order for variety, and with just a single outburst of melodrama. Given the creative freedom that fiction affords him, Feret chooses to punctuate the work as a political statement-that Mozart’s sister was a victim of his father’s and of society’s sexism, an ideology that might allow her to sing and play the harpsichord, but not to use her copious musical talent to play the violin or, more important, to compose music. In fact, there is not a single example surviving today of any of her compositions. She ruins her life by her subservience to her father, Leopold, resulting in her loveless marriage to an older man with five children and her eventual languishing in old age, exhausted, blind, and living like a pauper though she did in fact leave a handsome estate of 7837 guldens.

Nannerl Mozart (Marie Feret) is seen at the age of fourteen, four years older than her brother, Wolfgang (David Moreau). In the man’s world that was 18th century Paris and Austria, father Leopold (Marc Barbe), himself a composer, conductor, teacher and violinist, doted on Wolfgang, whom he considered the greater prodigy and more important, Wolfgang was a man. Leopold parades both Nannerl and Wolfgang on a tour of Europe where they played and sang for royalty. But Nannerl gets a break or sorts by her friendship with two of womanizing King Louis XV’s children, Louise de France (Lisa Feret), stashed away in a strict abbey, and more importantly her bonding with the seventeen-year-old Le Dauphin (Clovis Fouin), who was grieving the death of his wife. Given that Le Dauphin was in mourning, the only way Nannerl could speak with him was to dress as a boy, which seemed agreeable enough as she was determined to deliver a letter to him from his admirer, Louise de France. When the Dauphin heard Nannerl sing a high C and revealed herself as a woman, he fell in love, asked her to compose music for him, using her compositions at several recitals for the nobility.

Since not a single composition exists today by Nannerl, the music of the soundtrack is original, by concert pianist Marie Jeanne Serero, not bad at all, in fact good enough to convince a non-musicologist that the sounds came from the pen of Wolfgang or Nannerl. Strangely, the compositions are all in the baroque style, though the 18th century classical age brought in by Papa Haydn had trumped the 17th century baroque of Bach.

Unrated. 120 minutes. (c) 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online

Overall – C