This high-minded, dense and in many ways impressive drama about classical music from Canadian director Sofia Bohdanowicz could serve as an introspective companion piece to Tár. Where Todd Fields’ film was concerned with artists out in the world and modern cancel culture, here the focus is unswervingly on art itself: its inner sustaining emotional function for the artist and, more widely, for all of us.
Deragh Campbell stars as academic researcher Audrey Benac, a character she has played before for Bohdanowicz, including in Veslemøy’s Song, the 2018 short from which Measures for a Funeral has been expanded. This time Audrey is on the trail of Kathleen Parlow, a virtuosic real-life 20th-century violinist who, in this film, tutored her grandfather. Music weighs heavily on the Benac family; as Audrey rifles through university archives, she receives guilt-ridden calls from her dying mother, a failed musician who holds her responsible for her stalled career. Carrying her grandfather’s instrument like some form of penance, this timorous student seems to be seeking redemption through her interest in Parlow, a maverick who refused marriage in order to dedicate herself to her art.
