A Late Quartet (2012) was written and directed by the American documentarian Yaron Silberman. It’s a subtle, intelligent feature film with a suitably resonant title. The film quietly observes the internal dynamics of the Fugue String Quartet, an internationally acclaimed musical group founded and based in New York that has been playing around the world for 25 years. We encounter the quartet as an entity and then get to know the musicians as individuals. We sense the tensions between them but appreciate that they have been subsumed into their quarter of century of playing together. They have found satisfaction not in discarding their individuality but in unselfishly contributing to a collaborative endeavour. The founder of the quartet discovers he is unwell and finds he is unable to continue, following which personal tensions in the quartet rise to the surface. Their turbulence contrasts with the serenity of the music (Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14, opus 131).
The film is beautifully acted by a stellar cast (for example Christopher Walken and Phillip Seymour Hoffman) and, needless to say, the music is exquisite, particularly because we can listen to the uncompressed sound on a BluRay version of the film. The film invites comment on how we might understand the deep nonverbal communication that underlies certain aspects of our relationships, particularly because at the same time we may fail to communicate in any way other equally important aspects of our relationship to the same person(s).
