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Mahler on the Couch review
:. Director: Percy Adlon
:. Starring: Johannes Silberschneider, Barbara Romaner
:. Running Time: 1:38
:. Year: 2010
:. Country: Austria
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When you are at a film festival, you usually try to cover a wide range of films, including genres and stories you might not be familiar with. Looking at the notes about Mahler on the Couch, this film looked somewhat intriguing, chronicling meetings between classical music composer Gustav Mahler (Johannes Silberschneider) and Sigmund Freud (Karl Markovics): Seeking advice about the struggling relationship with his young and volatile wife (Barbara Romaner), Malher sits on Freud's couch for a few sessions, recounting their love story seen here in flashbacks.
There has been quite a few film and TV works that have been focusing on the couch these last few years, the most memorable involving a mafia boss called Tony Soprano. But what made this TV show worked was the fact that it involved a quite extraordinary life, with the psychiatrist sessions acting as a counterbalance, reminding us and the characters that this isn't a normal life. Here, however, Mr. Freud mostly sits quietly and listens, while Malher tells a story we've heard million times, the tale of a self-centered artistic genius who sacrificed everybody around him to his art, including his wife.
While I'm not that familiar with classical music, I'm not sure that the world has been waiting impatiently for a movie about Mahler and, even if his fans were, there won't be much they will learn about his music here; as for the neophytes, they won't get much out of this either, as neither his music pompous-sounding if you ask me nor his bland life have the kind of crossover appeal that would reach across generations; for a fact, Mahler isn't Jim Morrison, Mozart, Van Gogh or even Jackson Pollock and beside a few European classical music afficionados, I don't really see who might be interested in seeing that movie.
There is not much you will learn about Freud either, those two characters being used for their names but lacking any historical dimension because of the way they are depicted here. Even though such a story certainly didn't need a blockbuster-like budget, the TV movie feel of this production doesn't really add to the excitement. Would Mahler on the Couch have been shown on TV, on some European artsy channel think Arte , we might have been able to cut it some slack, but seen on the big screen, at a film festival, it looks oddly out of place. This is even more surprising as co-writer/director is responsible for an international cult film, Bagdad Café, but I'm suspecting that Mahler on the Couch have work wasn't destined for the big screen in the first place, part of its failure as a festival entry having to be shared by the LA film festival programmers.
Fred Thom
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