The title of Mozart’s Sister emphasizes its key conflict: Nannerl Mozart is doomed to be overshadowed by her younger brother. (Though qualified, the original French title Nannerl, la soeur de Mozart at least included the heroine’s name.) This refreshingly unconventional biopic opens in the winter of 1766, with Leopold and Anna-Maria Mozart (Marc Barbe and Delphine Chuillot) and their musical children in the midst of a grueling tour of Europe, during which performances, lodging, and sustenance are never guaranteed. Fourteen-year-old Nannerl (Marie Féret) struggles with resentment as her father shifts the spotlight to young Wolfgang (David Moreau). After an unplanned stop at a French abbey, where Nannerl strikes up a friendship with Princess Louise (Lisa Féret), the family secures an engagement at the Palace of Versailles. A romantic subplot involving the Dauphin (Clovis Fouin) generates the film’s strongest momentum, even as it takes historical liberties. (For one thing, the Dauphin died shortly before this action was supposed to have taken place.) To maintain a veneer of propriety for this budding relationship, Nannerl — ironically — must dress in men’s clothing. Ultimately, though, the rigid distinctions of sex and class in 18th-century Europe, along with Wolfgang’s undeniable talent, conspire to limit her possibilities, both personally and professionally.
Through intensive research and sympathetic imagination, writer-director René Féret has devised a subtle, layered story (Leopold, for example, never becomes a one-dimensional villain) with a somber but not humorless tone. Féret has wisely limited the chronological focus to a crucial year in Nannerl’s life, but at two hours even, Mozart’s Sister feels a bit long for a film in which the drama is so heavily internalized. Still, it’s a superb example of period filmmaking on a limited budget; Féret has trusted his feel for the material, the authenticity of the locations (which include Versailles), and the talent of costume designer Dominique Louis. Composer Marie-Jeanne Serrero rises to the unique challenge of creating new pieces in the baroque style to represent Nannerl’s compositions, all of which have been lost to history. These fit nicely alongside existing works played by the Mozart children.
Féret is a prolific filmmaker in France, but his films are rarely distributed in this country. If Mozart’s Sister is any indication, his work deserves to be seen more widely. He avoids the formal, painterly compositions favored by directors of films set in this era, opting instead for a looser style that uses handheld camerawork and zooms to bring immediacy to the cramped inns where the Mozarts sleep and the vast royal courts where they perform. In the film’s non-musical moments, the sound design is full of evocative details — the rustle of fabric, the creaking of wooden beds. Féret has an eye for faces that may not be attractive by modern standards but are interesting, memorable, and period appropriate. He has cast his daughters in key roles (filmmaking, for the Férets, is a family affair, much as music was for the Mozarts), and happily, both are fine performers: Lisa shines as the assertive Louise, and Marie anchors the film in the tricky lead role. Nannerl is a mostly passive heroine who could easily have receded into the background, but Marie draws the audience into her inner struggle of confusion, hope, and disappointment through a long, expressive face touchingly poised between gawkiness and melancholic beauty.
Although the characters never act out of accordance with the customs of the time, they often exhibit realistic behaviors of a sort rarely captured in commercial films: the adolescent characters’ giggles, grimaces, and flat speech tones carry a jolt of real-world recognition that shows up the visual and verbal tics of Hollywood coming-of-age films as a stylized language we’ve been conditioned to accept. Nor are the characters made privy to the audience’s knowledge of the future; they know only the past and present, like people living life. Nannerl chafes at her role, not because of its historical implications, but as a young woman resentful of her domineering father. Every era has its active rebels who fight to change the world they live in, but most of us accept the limitations imposed upon us — some serenely and philosophically, like Louise, and some, like Nannerl, with quiet heartbreak.
