A Late Quartet

Love listening to the fiddle or violin.

Would be nice to sit back and listen to a couple of hours of violin or fiddle music with an ample supply of grapes and unpasteurized cheese plus a nice glass of red wine.

I don't know that much about classical music but I have a couple of favourite texts (Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Rachmaninoff's Symphony no. 2) and enjoy tuning into classical radio stations when I find myself moving from one place to another in an automobile. I usually find that there are moments within many works that induce compelling impressions and others that patiently/quizzically/reflectively/demonstratively/emotively set the scene. The relationship between these elements interpreted through my subjective pluralisis can create a narrative of sorts, a story, an idiom. The same thing happens when I listen to jazz or pop music, The Rolling Stones's Let it Bleed lodged in my memory as the first album to which I suddenly applied this universal transition.

That's obvious enough.

The structural elements within Yaron Zilberman's A Late Quartet resemble a classical piece of music, as can every film I suppose depending on the relative position of its viewer and their own transsemantic didactic verisimilitude.

The film humanizes the performance of classical music with a subtle piquant plasticity which is simultaneously confident, energetically atonal, and furtively self-critical, perhaps theorizing/applying a classical perception of the postmodern, except when it comes to the production of the music itself.

The daring contends with the quartet's format within and the consequent side affects necessitate an harmonious etherealization (in terms of its performance).

I was more concerned with Christopher Walken's (Peter Mitchell) internal posture. It's classic Christopher Walken. One scene precociously pastiches his role in Pulp Fiction and his lines are delivered with the same characteristic bright, perspicacious, concerned yet uncommitted comfortably chilling dexterity that has made him a cinematic icon.

But he's not playing a gangster and/or someone with underlying violent explosivities, steeping, ready to erupt.

He's probably had lots of roles where he doesn't play such characters in films I unfortunately haven't seen.

But in A Late Quartet he plays the friendly, wise, avuncular rock that collegially holds a prominent sophisticated classical music quartet together.

There's one scene where he's sitting back thinking about the death of his wife after some heated social interaction. There's no dialogue, but tears are produced, and, when it's situated within the context of the film, while bearing in mind his traditional roles, which A Late Quartet seems to be doing, it transforms the classical perception of his expressions into something equally affective yet much less threatening.

As if the goal is the reconceptualization of volatility.

His performance isn't the only one that stands out.

Original music by Angelo Badalamenti, cinematography by Frederick Elmes.