While the Les Arcs European Film Festival has been packing up for more than a week, let's take a look back at one of the films in competition that won the 2017 Cineuropa Prize. Sonata for Roos, by Dutch director Boudewijn Koole, is perplexing as its rhythm is contemplative. But in the end, the work hits the nail on the head in its search for beauty and meaning. The editor's criticism!
Sonata for Roos : a singular film about filial relations
Five years after Little Bird, his first feature film, Dutch director Boudewijn Koole ventures this time on the complicated paths of the relationship between a mother and her daughter. The director does not hide it: he was largely inspired by the stormy relationship that his two sisters have long maintained with their mother.
The synopsis ? Like every year, Roos, (Rifka Lodeizen), a photographer, goes to visit his mother, Louise (Elsie de Brauw), and his teenage half-brother, Bengt (Marcus Hanssen), who live in Norway. But this time, the thirty-year-old arrives with shocking news. If relations with Bengt are generally good, those with Louise have always been more complicated. A permanent and diffuse tension seems to inhabit their exchanges. Roos will have to find the resources to break this news to his family.
It is in the heart of a place immobilized by snow and ice, that the setting takes place. Everything seems to be padded: sounds, atmospheres, exchanges, dialogues and even feelings. Especially those of the mother towards her daughter: Louise appears distant, cold and insensitive to the malaise and requests of Roos. A great pianist, now teaching local children, Louise often takes refuge in her notes and melodies when situations become too hard to assume emotionally.
Roos and Louise, the two protagonists, resist and oppose each other in their suffering, their resentments and their misunderstandings. They keep crossing paths and encountering difficulties in reaching each other. Their ballet, sonorous and silent, is made up of glances, short dialogues, sounds, and scattered musical notes. He mixes love and filial hatred with an almost Bergmanian tragedy…
And it is in a contemplative, distanced, serious, poetic way, accompanied by coldness, and a subtle grace that the Dutch filmmaker chooses to tell this story. But to get in, you have to hang on. Because it is an understatement to say that Sonata for Roos is singular. The work has the taste of cleavage as it can leave perplexed one spectator and delight another…. But when you're there, Sonata pour Roos reveals beautiful nuggets. Like those frozen moments where the screen gives way to the shots of the young photographer: details and close-ups on elements of nature or everyday life that the simple camera would have scanned in two seconds. An ode to nature, whiteness, silence, disappearance, freedom and choice, Sonata pour Roos is above all a film that allows itself the slowness to narrate and unfold delicately in power.
A work that takes its time
It is with an exacerbated slowness and a praise of the static that the director chooses to unfold this delicate and sensitive story. Everything in the film seems to stretch. The rhythm obviously, but also the music, crystalline and scattered, and obviously the announcement of the girl, around which the narration and the work are placed in orbit.
After the astonishment at this atypical rhythm, we discover a melodious and serious film, like a piano sonata where the tragedy of life, the complexity of family relationships and the inevitable choice points. In Sonata for Roos, the backdrop is a natural beauty, raw and delicate at the same time.Particular attention is given to nature. A nature frozen by snow, like the mother-daughter relationship shaken by resentment, tension and communication difficulties. The story has a resonance, in short, all universal. The success of the film lies in this accurate transcription of the complexity of family relationships, without denying their importance and richness.
Sonata for Roos is not easily tamed. Some will miss the work out of impatience or perplexity. If we have some reservations – lengths and dialogues where it is sometimes difficult to enter – the film, original and little seen in the cinema, will conquer the followers of a different seventh art, far from the beaten track. See you on April 18, 2018 to make your own opinion!
The trailer of Sonata for Roos:
