Review of Dieter Berner’s film “The Master and His Muse”

Dieter Berner’s film “The Master and His Muse” (Alma & Oskar) has been released. The love story of the artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) and the famous Viennese femme fatale Alma Mahler (1879–1964) is told in a film without the ambitions of auteur cinema, but nevertheless aroused interest Andrey Plakhov.

There’s a lot to see here. Art scandals of the Vienna Secession era. Crazy romances and sexual escapades. Oscar’s ecstatic love for Alma. Front-line wounds and mental breakdowns. Kokoschka’s return as a “ghost”: he was falsely declared to have died in the war. Look for such heroes for cinema in other times. Once the “resurrected” Kokoschka lived for 94 years, traveled around the world, produced a huge number of paintings, and lived the second half of his stormy life in a happy marriage that pacified his old age.

Matching him is Alma Schindler, an ambitious socialite and femme fatale, also a long-liver who lived to be 85 years old. In addition to her early marriage to Gustav Mahler, his “merry widow” was married to the architect Walter Gropius and the writer Franz Werfel; with the latter she fled to America from the Nazis. She recognized geniuses with a sense of smell and was drawn to them from her youth. Among her fans and friends are Gustav Klimt, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Gerhart Hauptmann, Maurice Ravel, Thomas Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Igor Stravinsky, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein. God himself ordered a film to be made about the woman who was called the “symbolic image of the century,” the muse of geniuses, the embodiment of the spirit of Vienna, but also “an anti-Semite” and a “cloaca.” And she really appears in the films “Mahler” by Ken Russell, “Bride of the Wind” by Bruce Beresford, in the series about the Mann family; her romance with young Kokoschka inspired Ralph Fiennes and Peter Greenaway, who also intended to film it.

The film “The Master and His Muse” was directed by Austrian director Dieter Berner, who dedicated one of his previous film works to the biography of Egon Schiele. Behind these experiments is the tradition of Austrian costume melodrama, which once made Romy Schneider famous in a series of films about “Sissi” – Empress Elizabeth. Berner also shoots a melodrama, but not a romantic one, but a decadent one: its characters are not royalty, but the artists of the Vienna Secession – inexhaustible sources of painful passions. Following Ludwig of Bavaria and Elizabeth, they are now joining the industry of pop tourist kitsch.

Even compared to the rest of the charismatic figures of this artistic movement, Kokoschka was considered a wild weed and stood out for his particularly eccentric, unbridled disposition. He was nicknamed the “Viennese Faun” and his work “syphilitic”; The film shows how the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, threatens to break the bones of a young impudent man for his paintings. A couple of decades later they would infuriate Mussolini and Goebbels, who would display them at a Nazi-sponsored exhibition of “degenerate art.”

But this is already beyond the scope of the film, which does not turn into a standard biopic spanning decades, but provides an emotional clot of the destinies of two superpersonalities. They connected for a short period of time when the world was experiencing the shock of an impending world war; their stormy, suicidal passion resonates with the destructive hurricanes of the era. This passion gave birth to Kokoschka’s main masterpiece, The Bride of the Wind; To work on the film, the famous painting was even removed from the exhibition of the Basel Museum. Fortunately, the director does not pretend to reveal “all the secrets” of the creative process, probably knowing that in cinema such attempts usually fail. And it focuses on the psychology of love, not creativity. Although Alma also had ambitions in the artistic field, considering herself a professional composer, in the film this motive sounds more like a routine reference to the feminist agenda.

The main burden ultimately falls on the actors: Alma was played by Emily Cox, and Oscar was played by Valentin Postlmayr, whom the director searched for for two years and found after seeing his passionate and energetic Romeo in a Shakespearean play. Essentially, the film is a visualized dialogue between the characters, shot with two cameras, as if from two points of view. Its culmination is the appearance of Alma, who had disappeared from Kokoschka’s life, in the form of a “copy” – a human-sized rag doll, in a blue velvet dress, who accompanied the inconsolable artist to theaters and orgiastic parties. In one of them, he cut off her head in revenge, but this also remained outside the scope of the film, which was as radical in the choice of plot and characters as it was neatly traditional in execution and interpretation.