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The imperious aesthete here hails music as a masculine medium, Frank Borzage at his most delirious firmly refutes him. The aspiring pianist (Catherine McLeod) is ushered into the recital chamber where the maestro (Philip Dorn) disinterestedly sees potential pupils ("Bach, no nonsense," he orders a teenage André Previn), an earful of Beethoven's Appassionata begins the romance. Plucked from a Pennsylvania farm for a European tour, she flowers as a performer while experiencing the professeur's childish arrogance. She attacks the ivories with Liebestod when he woos another girl, Rachmaninoff at her Carnegie Hall debut turns a concert into a duel—as eruptions of repressed yearning and anger fill the air, the camera tracks from the vastness of the auditorium to the intimacy of the playing. The couple splits and the heroine marries her childhood beau (William Carter), yet, according to babushka (Maria Ouspenskaya), "walls cannot stop their voices." Svengalis and Olympias "in love with a dream," the Borzage rapture in Technicolor. Dissolves at the service of mysterious connections: At home the husband seizes the hand at the piano and the maestro in New York freezes mid-note, the tiny daughter tries the keyboard for the first time as a thunderstorm rages outside and the old confidante expires with libretto in hand. The eternal mistress of art versus the thankless spouse (cf. Russell's Mahler), Lean in Brief Encounter shares the tune of the unconsummated affair. Rite of passage between generations but not before one final rendezvous for rekindled flames, its ardent interplay of crescendos and audiences suggesting a live sex-show of emotions. "Play it through, see what happens," two years later there's The Red Shoes. With Felix Bressart, Elizabeth Patterson, Vanessa Brown, Cora Witherspoon, and Fritz Feld.
--- Fernando F. Croce |