At a Q&A screening of Challengers this past November conducted in the Aero Theatre, director Luca Guadagnino, in laid-back fashion, recalled that he told screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes – “I don’t know anything about tennis, but I do know about desire.” In the subsequent weeks, these words, met with laughter at the screening, would reenact themselves within my mind in a palatable Italian accent. Desire is an experience shared by all human beings. It is a persistent root of pain, and amidst a lineup of films characterized by pain and destructive attitudes, it has been an insightful undertaking to pay attention to the ways in which desire has manifested itself within the festival’s current programming.
For me, the exploration of desire engenders a cinematic work with a special sense of compassion. Hence, it is fascinating that a film so cold and ghostly as Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling can travel so internally into the depths of the honest human psyche. It is a sprawling behemoth of a film encased within the confines of a farm in Altmark, Germany. The farmhouse that constitutes this space is both transformational and ageless. The walls. The floors. The courtyard. The lake. They are at once antiquated and mutable, still and fluid. By keeping all characters of this ensemble piece affixed to a single yet multi-faceted location, Schilinski effectively interweaves the lives of four generations of women – Alma (Hanna Heckt), Erika (Lea Drinda), Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), and Lenka (Laeni Geiseler) – all saddled with their own forbidden desires.
Confidently, Schilinski neglects to gift the viewer a sense of linearity, or a defined path as to how all these characters are tethered to each other. While perplexing, and for some, taxing to the attention, I found the puzzle-like nature of Sound of Falling one of its most gravitational qualities. Rather than being funneled into deciphering a family tree, the viewer is instead directed towards discovering how history can repeat itself. It becomes evident that no matter the time period, kitchen design, or style of vehicle – certain human qualities are perpetual.
Still, the film is so dense, that upon one mere viewing, it is difficult to extrapolate the conceptual abundance that accounts for its runtime, resulting in a viewing experience made personal. Without guidelines, it was satisfying to investigate the threads that personally interested me, or even just the threads that stood out as a result of my own methods of processing the media I consume. It is a film that can be traversed through practically any lens – feminist, historical, disability, etc.
As a result, Sound of Falling impressed two primary concepts throughout my viewing – desire and the emulation of desire. In an expertly crafted cold-open, we are introduced to Erika, who hobbles down a hallway lit with gloom. We may think that one of her legs is missing at first, but it is quickly apparent that this is an act. A farce to explore what it must feel like to be her Uncle Fritz (Martin Rother), to whom she feels a strong attraction towards. Erika’s desires take her further. She can take pleasure in experiencing being what she wants, but she also must take from what she wants. To do so, she takes a drop of the sweat upon his stomach, tasting what is attainable of his physical being.
By the moment the title card arrives, Sound of Falling promises to the viewer that whatever subject matter it chooses to portray will not be forged with safety or enjoyment in mind. The women of Altmark explore their fascinations with an acute confidence. In doing so, any curiosity is rendered actionable: the taboo is ushered to the forefront – concerned with death, sex, incest, and affection. Through this, an ensemble cast is granted memorable, differentiating qualities. We know them through what they pursue, and how they pursue it.
The young Alma, an ineffably spiritual and arresting presence who occupies the film’s WW1 Altmark narrative is centered in a scene that encapsulates this confidence adroitly. Her greatest obsession, a deceased young girl she was named after with the same blonde hair and the same pale face, is extracted from the picture frame into reality. Alma imitates deceased Alma’s position to exact precision, creating one of the most arresting frames of the film. Desire is habitually haunting. From the outside perspective, it can feel wrong. And by seeing desire as dark and strange as this from such a young vessel, desire is humanized, and further eternalized by the transcendence of time. It can reappear as the choice of a strawberry popsicle or the constant imagination of suicide.
An alternative way desire is frequently presented in Sound of Falling manifests through the gaze. Lenka, who exists within the most modern, Airpod-ridden timeline of the film, fixates on her new friend Kaya (Ninel Geiger). Much of this fixation is based in her command of the face and the eyes. To the utterly atmospheric ballad of “Stranger” by Anna von Hausswolff, the narrative slows to provide us a tender sequence of observation. Lenka and Kaya examine each other’s faces in a speckled lake of shockingly gorgeous greens and browns. Although they are largely still, the contemplation in their stares, and particularly Lenka’s, imitates the spirit of a dance, and tells of intrigue and yearning.
To condense Sound of Falling the best I can, it is a film that looks outward and successively, inward. Halfway through the film, Angelika (Lena Urzwndowsky), inhabitant of 1980s Altmark, says that the men of the farm “thought they were looking at me, but I was looking at them.” Even as her back is turned, she notices being noticed. Her awareness embodies the control Sound of Falling has over the viewer. Characters repetitively look into the center of the camera, generating an uneasy consciousness of the human spirit. A glance is an assertion – what you see in the film is an extension of your own habits, and those habits are not just distinct to you, but all that came before and will come after you as well. Your desire is not just your own.