This film lost me near the beginning when old Traude refuses to deal with Jenny's messy hands during the interviews with new students. I mean, Traude is supposed to be a woman who is devoted to music and who wants to help female inmates of a prison to learn piano. And she turns Jenny away because she plays "Negro music" and has filthy hands? Couldn't Chris Block, the writer and director, have come up with a more realistic reason for Jenny to bash Mutze nearly to death, thus turning him from what was initially a sympathetic character into a jailer out for revenge? The wartime lesbian subplot didn't add anything to the main plot. If anything, it seemed gratuitous. How could a woman who was daring enough to love another woman under the gaze of Nazis, come to hate "Negro Music"? These two characteristics don't seem to fit together.
The other weird, if not gratuitous, inclusion was the incest subplot between Jenny and her father. Aside from Jenny's outbursts, it was handled vaguely, as it it were no more important than the refusal (or inability) of Mutze's daughter to curtsy to Traude.
And the music drove me crazy. The Mozart and Schubert pieces have been played to death. Surely a couple of more interesting études out of the thousands upon thousands that have been written by hundreds of composers could have relieved the boredom of hearing these hackneyed tunes over and over for the entire length of the film.
I came to this film expecting to like it, which is why I'm so bloody disgusted. But by the time the last plot contrivance was thrown at us: Jenny finding a bottle of her detested father's favourite booze at Traude's place and thus setting up a melodramatic bellowfest, not even the heralded last "vier minuten" could save it.
The other weird, if not gratuitous, inclusion was the incest subplot between Jenny and her father. Aside from Jenny's outbursts, it was handled vaguely, as it it were no more important than the refusal (or inability) of Mutze's daughter to curtsy to Traude.
And the music drove me crazy. The Mozart and Schubert pieces have been played to death. Surely a couple of more interesting études out of the thousands upon thousands that have been written by hundreds of composers could have relieved the boredom of hearing these hackneyed tunes over and over for the entire length of the film.
I came to this film expecting to like it, which is why I'm so bloody disgusted. But by the time the last plot contrivance was thrown at us: Jenny finding a bottle of her detested father's favourite booze at Traude's place and thus setting up a melodramatic bellowfest, not even the heralded last "vier minuten" could save it.