People born with gifts often don't have an easy time with them, and Chris Kraus's Four Minutes (Vier Minuten) expressly explores the dark side of disenfranchised genius.
Jenny von Loeben (Hannah Herzprung) is a piano prodigy suffering in a women's prison after taking the murder wrap for her deadbeat boyfriend. Traude Krüger (Monica Bleibtreu) is her temporally paralyzed coach, having spent her life teaching piano to incarcerated women in memory of her lesbian lover, who was hung by a piano wire because of her ethnicity during the final days of World War II. Mütze (Sven Pippig) is the iconic lagging student, devoted to his patronage but unable to accept Jenny's privilege, especially after she sends him to the hospital for reconstructive surgery. Revenge, jealousy, cruelty, and loss loom large in this hard-boiled script, where no one is spared from Jenny's wanton precision. Her rage is poignantly juxtaposed with Krüger's crystallized loneliness and Kraus soothes the overt mania by interweaving tender moments from Krüger's youthful affair. Every character executes their designs to the best of their abilities in a convoluted deconstruction of what it means to forgive. Imprisoned lives and disadvantaged dreams attempting to stoically adjust to political postures that consistently crush them, where love is fleetingly permanent and trust a compromised conception. Four Minutes lays on the extremes and some of the situations are slightly far fetched, but within the evocative melodrama Herzprung and Bleibtrau provide powerful portrayals of the brutally alacric midpoint where devotion and corruption collide.
Jenny is given her chance, four minutes for fame, praised by the bourgeoise, arrested through the tradition. The dénouement presents a powerful critique of systematic condemnation while inherent within Jenny's rhythm lies a passionate orchestration of derelict cultural prodigy.
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