In Search of Chopin
Written and directed by Phil Grabsky
Rated PG, 112 minutes
★★★
Having knocked over Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn, the British documentary-maker Phil Grabsky here goes looking for the great Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin, in much the same polite and determined manner he has used before.
He talks to an impressive clutch of concert pianists, some of them celebrated interpreters of Chopin – Daniel Barenboim, Lars Vogt, Ronald Brautigam, Leif Ove Andsnes. He interviews biographer Jeremy Siepmann, author of Chopin – The Reluctant Romantic. The pianists play live, stopping to explain, dissect and marvel at the composer’s achievements and wonder about his creative influences. These analytical interviews are often the best part of the Grabsky style, because they reveal the deeper musical secrets, and the connecting lines through history.
Many of the interviews are conducted in historically relevant places, and sometimes the music is played on historically relevant pianos – notably the Pleyel et Cie pianos that Chopin made famous in Paris.
Grabsky has had great success with this series of films, all of which are titled In search of…, but the style is looking dated. They are classically made documentaries, perfectly crafted for television arts slots on a Sunday afternoon, although there is now a faithful theatrical audience as well, perhaps because of the high-fidelity production.
In this case, the style matches the subject – a calm exterior conceals a degree of passion. By the time he settled in Paris in 1831, after his self-imposed political exile from Poland, Chopin was at pains to present himself as a conservative gentleman, attired in expensive clothes, teaching the children of the rich and moving in the highest circles. He rarely performed in public, despite his major celebrity. He was quiet, moody, introspective and apparently capable of a certain wit that is not evident in his music, as one of the interviewees points out.
All of this was an act. Beneath the carefully polished exterior roiled a restless spirit and a passionate heart, made more intense by a lifetime of illness that would kill him at the age of 39. Tuberculosis, depression, loneliness – the film mentions all three, but does not delve too deeply lest it descend from the music into mere psychology. There is a certain perverse purity about that, but Grabsky is too severe in this case. Chopin’s music is surely a deep well of emotion, but all we can do here is peer into the well and wonder. Grabsky offers very little insight into what made Chopin unhappy, if indeed he was.
Chopin had a 10-year relationship with the most notorious woman of the age in France, the writer George Sand. Her real name was Amantine-Lucille- Aurore Dupin, she wore men’s clothes, a top hat, smoked cigars and was a political radical. The writer Jeremy Siepmann mentions them as the oddest of odd couples, but the relationship lasted longer than any other, for the composer. This alone could have filled a movie and Grabsky concedes that it was Chopin’s most productive period, particularly the summers at her family house, Nohant, in Berry. But it occupies no more than chronology allows in Grabsky’s dogged attempt to tell the whole life.
Even at 112 minutes, there is not enough time to go deep, it seems. Grabsky’s earlier films on the great composers have been rightly praised. This one is competent and informative, but less compelling. I am guessing that Grabsky does not love Chopin as he does the others. I don’t know, maybe Chopin was that much harder to go In Search Of. The film whets the appetite, rather than sates it.
