Composition and catharsis: Review of 'A Late Quartet'.

Why the sudden spate of movies about classical music quartets and impending death? Early this year, we had Quartet, about four senior singers in a retirement home. Now we have A Late Quartet, about a string ensemble facing the loss of one of its members. The film industry couldn’t possibly be subliminally associating classical music with ageing and fuddy-duddyness, could they? Shame on them. Perhaps before the year is out we’ll have The Latest Quartet, then we’ll know that classical music has carked it altogether.

Anyway, of the two movies (so far), Late is by far the more masterly. It is for all intents and purposes a chamber film — intimate, intricate and with very few players. Built around Beethoven’s ‘String Quartet No. 14 in C sharp minor’, which has seven movements meant to be played non-stop, it tries to be the filmic equivalent of a chamber piece. There is hardly ever more than three or four people in a frame, lots of close-ups, and the dialogue builds in a kind of interwoven layering. The plot is at first subdued, then different motifs come in until there are several strands going on at once.

In the beginning it is andante, almost too andante. You want to cough and look at your programme. Peter Mitchell (the peerless Christopher Walken), the cellist and patriarch of the world-famous quartet The Fugue, finds out he has Parkinson’s disease. This necessitates his replacement in the ensemble, which has played together for 25 years. Robert Gelbart (Philip Seymour Hoffman in a stellar turn) decides he doesn’t want to play second fiddle any more and demands to alternate chairs with first violinist Daniel Lerner (intriguingly played by Mark Ivanir). Meanwhile, Gelbart has problems with violist Juliette (Catherine Keener), who is also his wife.