Decades later, in the eighties, we meet Erika's niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowski), a dark-haired, bespectacled teenager who grew up in what is now the German Democratic Republic. She casts longing glances at the river – somewhere beyond it lies West Germany and another life. Angelika exudes a precocious sexual awareness, and she notices the creepy looks her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and her cousin Rainer (Florian Geiselmann) give her, even if they seem to have no idea about it. “I often pretended that I didn’t notice how they were looking at me,” Angelica says in a voiceover. “But in reality, it was me who was secretly watching them look at me.” Her current colleague, a teenage girl named Lenka (Lani Geiseler), soon learns to do the same in the face of male attention.
There is power in unspoken knowledge, Szylinski suggests, and a young girl's display of innocence and naivety can be a tool of subversion. But the film doesn't fall into the trap of bland homogenization; he knows that every era is fraught with its own horrors. Little Alma explains, with chilling incomprehension, her family's usual practice of sterilizing servants: the maid, she says, was sent away for a short time to be “safe for men.” On rare occasions, a voice from one chapter will comment on events from another. Angelica notes that after the end of World War II, many young women like Erica went to the river to drown themselves. “They were more afraid of what might happen than they were of death,” she says. The Sound of Falling is partly about how tragedy and trauma reverberate across generations. Over the course of a century, the untimely deaths of at least three girls have been recorded; the fourth disappears and is never seen again. Sexual violence is a scourge that is taken lightly. The characters dream of escaping, escaping, becoming someone else.
These are heavy themes, built for the sake of a potentially deterministic thesis: you might shudder to think what a director like Michael Haneke, a master of punitive arthouse formalism, would have done with the same cast of characters and themes. (Alma's mother, sullen and severely coiffed, could be straight out of “The White Ribbon,” Haneke's icy drama about a northern German village on the eve of World War I.) Szylinski goes in the opposite direction, with a balancing lightness of touch. It was as if she wanted to avoid the usual cinematic violence that now evokes only numb indifference, and to suggest the usual cruelty of women without depicting it on the screen. By teaching us to navigate, moment by moment, she brings the viewer's mind into a state of heightened alertness and feeling. It's a brilliant instinct, and “Sound of Falling”, for all its intricate thought, feels entirely instinctive.
The German title of Szylinski's film is “In die Sonne schauen”, which translates as “Looking at the Sun”. The title has no obvious interpretation, although it did make me think of the scene in which Angelique tries to get her mother Irma (Claudia Geisler-Bading) to find her blind spot—a physical exercise with a clear metaphorical application. Irm is an anxious, shy, fearful woman, and Geisler-Bading gives the most anguished performance in the film; her character seems to be forever out of sync with the world, and she can't ignore her own unhappiness. Angelica, on the contrary, is far-sighted enough to express this condition with the words: “You always see others only from the outside, but never yourself.”
The English-language name poses an even greater mystery. In one scene, when a young girl falls fatally from a hayloft, the sound is cut completely. Is the sound of falling just silence? The words are reminiscent of the classic riddle about whether a tree falling in a forest makes a sound if no one hears it. The film may pose another version of the same question: Can we feel the joy, sadness, confusion and pain of those who came before us, even if they were never with us? Can our own feelings, in fact, be a psychic remnant of those long-ago experiences?
Perhaps this is why The Sound of Falling so often feels like a ghost story—why the farmhouse seems so indelibly haunted, and why the camera seems to drift between rooms and timelines with the whispering grace of a ghost. Szylinski leans toward the ghost. Her film is unapologetically obsessed with death and invites us to look more than once at the faces and bodies of the dead. The director seems particularly fascinated by the farewell rituals of the early twentieth century, steeped in religion and superstition. The deceased great-grandmother's eyes are covered with stones to facilitate her timely transition through the afterlife. Alma's older sister Leah (Greta Krämer), gone too soon, has her eyes sewn shut and then poses, sitting upright, for a family photo.
Our time is so saturated with visual media that it is a little startling to think back to an era when the significance of such images—tangible evidence of the existence of loved ones—could hardly be taken for granted. Alma can't help but touch on one photograph: a portrait of another late sister who died before our Alma was born. Her name was also Alma, and they have a striking resemblance in appearance. Could they really be the same soul now passing through two different bodies? Schilinski, always the deceiver, says nothing. But even her most mischievous plans are backed by a fundamental conviction, a belief in the power of art to awaken the dead. ♦
