Gotham Diary:
West Side
19 March 2013
In keeping with yesterday’s dismal weather, I watched a movie that I’d missed in the theatres last year, Yaron Zilberman’s A Late Quartet. This is not the film with Maggie Smith. It’s about a string quartet called The Fugue that has been together for twenty-five years. The cellist, a generation older than the other members of the ensemble, discovers that he is in the early stages of Parkinson’s, and his decision to retire while he’s still capable of playing well rips the network that binds the younger musicians. As Peter, Christopher Walken turns in a surprising performance; shorn of weird, unsettling looks, his character is simply a magisterial and somewhat stern Juilliard professor and Upper West Side instrumentalist. For once, Mr Walken plays the stable character.
The other three members of the quartet were students when they joined The Fugue; now they are in their late forties, and in sore need of reassessment. Even before Peter’s announcement, Robert, the second violinist (Philip Seymour Hoffman) has been pressing for change — he agrees with Peter that the quartet ought to perform a Beethoven cycle from memory — and he raises another suggestion even as he and the others leave Peter’s house. He wants to alternate with Daniel, the first violinist, on a fifty-fifty basis. Daniel (Mark Ivanir), the obsessive perfectionist in the group — he depends, in performance, on his heavily marked-up scores — naturally objects, claiming however that Robert’s proposal is badly timed. He arranges to meet with Robert’s wife, Juliette (Catherine Keener), on the sly — on Central Park’s Bow Bridge, where, it seems, they used to meet when they were students at Juilliard. No state secrets are bandied about in this picturesque location, but the scene wallows in the same murk of disloyalty and betrayal (for a higher cause, of course!) that oozes through the best spy movies. When Robert finds out about the meeting, he takes off into the Key of G (as Fossil Darling puts it) and does something stupid; but it is a stupidity toward which he has been predisposed by the marriage fatigue funking his life with Juliette — nothing musical. Meanwhile, Daniel takes up with Alexandra (Imogen Poots), a gifted violinist who happens to be Juliette and Robert’s daughter. And did I mention that, as a young man, Peter belonged to another quartet, The Hudson, which broke up when another member died in childbirth, leaving a daughter — Juliette, who was then brought up by Peter and his late wife? These incestuous short-circuits really do seem to be a species of espionage.
How will things work out? Will the musicians’ egos, so suddenly exposed and flayed, drive them apart? Or will the immense inertia of a quarter-century’s collegial professionalism hold them together? Are these celebrated musicians just like the rest of us, or has serious music-making invested them with special rigor? Watching a not-recent video of her mother talk about her tragic entry into the world and her relationship with Peter, Alexandra concludes that she cannot go on with Daniel, and this decision is the counterweight to Peter’s determination to retire. A Late Quartet manages to be a cliffhanger.
A Late Quartet is a movie about the importance, for some people, in certain walks of life, of living in New York, and New York life is shown with remarkable fidelity. When The Fugue performs, it is at Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the movie also visits the Frick Collection. Alexandra’s apartment is totally plausible — a dump with some nice sticks of furniture and a well-upholstered bed. Sotheby’s auctioneer David Redden, whom we last saw in W/E (he was auctioning off gloves then; it’s violins now) makes it official: these are New Yorkers living at the center of their worlds.
Roiling through the background is Beethoven’s seven-movement late quartet, Nº 14 in c-Sharp. We never hear the music played from beginning to end, of course — that would be staggeringly uncinematic — but the snippets are so plentiful and drawn from every part of the quartet that, listening to the Beethoven afterward, I felt that everything that I was hearing had been somewhere in the movie.
***
In the evening, as snow fell on longing for spring, we watched Funny Face, Stanley Donen’s 1957 revival of the old Gershwin show. This was part of my Diana-Vreeland-and-fashion project, which rests on the proposition that Vreeland herself was more fashionable than her magazines and models, than the designers and their customers. She was fashion, living at a high pitch and making a remarkable appearance that only intensified when she opened her mouth. In Funny Face, Kay Thompson plays an editor obviously based on Vreeland — she barks Vreeland’s trademark “pizzazz” in every scene — and it’s clear that she, also, is the center of fashion. Lovely Audrey Hepburn, discovered in bluestocking drag in a Greenwich Village bookshop, cleans up nicely and carries Givenchy’s creations like a princess, but she is never truly fashionable. She amends her original belief that fashion is vain and silly to concede that it can be fun, but it is never important to her. Women like Vreeland (and the also not-very-pretty Thompson) exploited fashion as a kind of booster rocket that took them into the precincts of power without sacrificing their womanliness. Their wardrobes were far from the most important fuel in the mix, but they were not incidental, either.
Funny Face is shot in a strange, gauzy color that seems to seep up from the French locations, but there is one studio scene with shrieking hues. As Fred Astaire does a dance below Hepburn’s hotel window, you can’t take your eyes off his light-blue socks, which match his dress shirt. (He isn’t wearing a tie.) Then there’s the bright green of a shopfront behind him. I would give anything to paint a room that color, I said to myself. Then it hit me, that, if not a room, I had painted my most massive bookcase in that very shade, which, as I recall, was named “Parrot.” I was trying to match the color of Loeb Classics in Greek.