, an old-fashioned swooner staged with elegant, modern technique. Further confirmation arrives with Cooper’s second directorial effort,, a loose biopic of conductor-composer Leonard Bernstein and his wife, actress Felicia Montealegre. The film, which premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, is a swirling love poem, both rousing and bitterly sad. It’s also confused, as passion can often make us.
. The first half or so of the film is in black and white, in a square aspect ratio, as Cooper quickly traces Bernstein’s rise to fame and then more deliberately captures scenes of Bernstein and Montealegre falling for one another amid a ghost-lit theater and the rolling hills of the Berkshires. They first meet at a smoky, song-filled house party and are instantly enamored of each other’s smarts and openness, their mutual willingness to feel and want in front of one another.
The Bernstein of it all—his uniquely notable presence in, and effect on, the world—is conjured up mostly through music, that which he wrote or famously conducted. What wonders these selections are: the towering thrill of his Ely Cathedral performance of Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony; the nimble pluck ofA Quiet Place
. Cooper relies heavily on these selections to convey meaning. And why shouldn’t he, when they are such testament to a prodigy’s output, his novel inventions and his singular ear for interpreting classics of old? The extended sequence in which Bernstein furiously conducts the Mahler symphony is especially striking, an artist in his older years finding his fire anew—nicely linked, in the movie’s narrative, with a rekindling of his marriage.
The union of Bernstein and Montealegre was peculiar or progressive, depending on whom you asked. Bernstein had many affairs with men, a fact from which the film—while still devoted to its mission of depicting a deep and abiding heterosexual marriage—does not shy away. Declarative statements are never made; labels are not assigned.
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