In the absence of any surer bet among the early summer offerings, I took a risk last Monday on a movie called The Lobster. After all, I love Colin Farrell and like Rachel Weisz, who were both featured actors in it (and if I had known Ben Whishaw was part of the cast, that would have increased the attraction for me). The advertised plot dealt with a society in which people were required to be members of a couple: if they failed to find a mate, they would be turned into an animal. This seemed a sufficiently whimsical premise to make for a possibly good movie.
Oh, how wrong I was. The Lobster is at once horrific and tedious—a difficult thing to carry off, but the director (his name is Yorgos Lanthimos, and I am whispering it here parenthetically just so you can avoid anything by him, ever) has somehow managed it. The acting style veers somewhere between Last Year at Marienbad and late Woody Allen, and the events depicted on the screen aim for a combination of the Stephen King of The Shining and the Ray Bradbury of Fahrenheit 451. None of these influences, however, can be blamed for the resulting mess, which is truly in a category of its own. The movie is not only pretentious and boring; it is also vindictive and cruel, to its viewers as well as its characters. It left my husband speechless—literally without a word to say—for ten minutes after we emerged from the theater, after which his first utterance was “I told you it would be bad!”
In desperate need of recuperative sustenance, we went on the following Friday to the San Francisco Symphony. I had two motives here: one was to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct Brahms’s First Symphony, a piece which never fails to delight me; the other was to listen to the North American premiere of a new Jörg Widmann piece called Trauermarsch, which featured (and was in fact written for) the pianist Yefim Bronfman. It will give you some sense of the evening’s power if I begin by saying that the first piece on the program, an eleven-minute “symphony” by C.P.E. Bach, was the only thing that didn’t pack a wallop.
It was smart of MTT, though, to precede the Widmann with an old piece of fluff, because it made modernity itself look good. Trauermarsch is like other Widmann compositions I’ve heard: unclassifiable, various, sometimes melodic rather than dissonant or difficult, but always distinctly of our time. As a collaboration between piano and orchestra, it is movingly interdependent. Only at the beginning does the pianist have a few notes of his own, played slowly against silence; after that he is constantly joining with (and competing with, and occasionally vanquishing) a whole range of orchestral effects that include a great deal of unusual percussion, both loud and muted brass, and a weird range of string sounds that include but are not limited to tuneful themes. The funereal subject matter signaled by the title is respected in the primarily slow pacing, but death is frightening and powerful here as well as ceremonially acknowledged: this is a funeral march to raise the hackles on one’s neck.
And then the Brahms was, if anything, even more thrilling. Listening to the rise and fall of the four grand movements, which pay tribute to without exactly imitating Beethoven, and which seem to mark the full range of human experience—from hope to disillusion to melancholy to invigorated resilience—I thought to myself: Brahms is one of the few composers who actually comes across as a nice man in his work. One of his key attributes is tenderness, a quality that is rare enough in the world at large but particularly rare in artists who are visibly trying to do something new. (Witness The Lobster, for an especially debased version of its absence.) Brahms seems filled with concern for us as well as himself. He wants to shake us up a bit, but he also wants to issue some kind of consolation—not false consolation, not an empty reassurance about our capacity to overcome loneliness or death, but the real consolation that has to do with the companionable, enveloping force of music. And at the end, as I stood among the other wildly applauding audience members (who included Yefim Bronfman—the eminent soloist had stayed on through the intermission just to hear the Brahms performed in the second half!), part of my pleasure derived from the sense that the message had been received.