'The score of life', complex family relationships in a film that looks back to Bergman's cinema
Matthias Glasner's feature film awarded at the Berlin Film Festival 2024 finally arrives in our cinemas
3' min read
3' min read
Drama mixes with tragicomedy while illness dances with the grotesque: 'The Score of Life', a German film that won the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay at the Berlin Film Festival 2024, is not afraid to mix styles and registers.
The direction is by Matthias Glasner, an author born in Hamburg in 1965, who finds a narrative balance with this film that he had rarely touched upon in his long career.
At the centre of the story are the Lunies, a family going through a period marked by various complications. Hitherto autonomous and independent, Lissy and Gerd find themselves in a critical phase of their lives: Gerd, who suffers from dementia, escapes Lissy's control and is increasingly unmanageable for her. In turn, Lissy begins to show signs of physical and emotional fragility.
The couple has two children, Tom and Ellen, who are very busy with their own lives, which are also complicated. Tom, a conductor, is grappling with conducting a piece composed by a difficult friend and, at the same time, has to deal with a new arrival in his family orbit. Ellen, on the other hand, who works as an assistant in a dental practice, tries to bring peace to her unstable and tormented life by starting an affair with a married doctor with whom she shares an addiction to alcohol.
It is certainly the script that is the most significant aspect of this layered, long-winded but also profound work: in its approximately 180-minute duration, genres and situations are mixed, resulting in a choral film, capable of involving and in which the spirit of Ingmar Bergman is echoed (there is a direct reference to a masterpiece such as 'Fanny & Alexander').
