Museum Hours (2012/2013)
Directed
by Jem Cohen
The
Cinema Guild, 107 minutes, Unrated. In German & English.
* *
* *
Not much happens in Museum Hours, but surrender to this gorgeous small film and you
will be mightily rewarded. And, thanks to a 2013 North American release in
theaters and DVD, you’ll have your chance.
The film’s thin story centers on Anne
(Margaret O’Hare), an Irish-Canadian woman forced to scrape together and borrow
money to make an emergency trip to Vienna in the dead of winter, where her cousin
lies mortally ill in a hospital. All she can do is wait and stretch her meager
cash stream as best she can. Tea, cheap pubs, a drafty down-market hotel room,
and trips to the Kunsthistorisches Museum are about all she can manage,
but she’s enthralled by the latter, especially the paintings of Pieter Brueghel
the Elder. Anne spends so much time in the museum that she eventually strikes a
friendship with Johann (Bobby Somers), a former hard-rock music manager who fled
club madness for a tranquil life as a museum guard. After hours, Johann shows
Anne his Vienna–an ordinary city bathed in gray by the weak wintery light, not
the glitzy Vienna of opera and the haute
bourgeoisie. A love affair? Not as you’d anticipate.
The film feels like a documentary, a mood enhanced by
the lack of an accompanying musical score. There are long shots in which the
camera pans museum walls and lingers on a mystical Tintoretto, a lush Raphael,
or a moody Rembrandt. The pacing is languid, but it’s hard not be drawn in by
gorgeous cinematography and razor sharp images produced by filming in a 1.78:1
high definition aspect ratio. It’s not quite 35mm quality, but it’s as close as
I’ve seen in a while. And the film needs to move slowly because its real star
is a dead man: Brueghel.
Brueghel is often lumped with Hieronymus Bosch as a
painter of debauchery and post-apocalyptic horrors. Not so, as art docent Gerda
Pachner (Ela Piplits) points out to a sceptical groups of visitors. She, the
camera, Anne, and Johann force us to look deeply into Brueghel’s works to
observe the mundane details. Through clever crosscutting between the paintings
and perambulations through Vienna, Brueghel appears more as a documentarian
committing daily life to canvass in both its prosaic and dramatic specifics.
Did Brueghel paint fantasized deformities, reprobates, and horrors? Have you
taken a good look around your world
these days? How would they look on canvas in 600 years? And do we even see the
mundane parts of life that Brueghel so lovingly rendered? Must we confront
death to appreciate how precious those moments are? Indeed, this film suggests
that sex, gluttony, food, beauty, horror, and death are the prosaic reality in
all periods of history.
I won’t pretend that this film will be everyone’s bowl
of gruel, but I found that it provoked more thought in its silences than most
films inspire in their monologues. --Rob
Weir
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