琴韵动我心

一名住在美国的俄裔钢琴老师索沙兹卡夫人，她教学过分认真，因为她认为自己不单教人弹琴，还教学生品味人生。她教导一名十五岁的印度少年曼尼克，要求他绝对服从，但她以前一名女学生珍妮的男朋友却不断游说曼尼克出来演奏赚钱，因而引起了印度少年人生态度的改变。

Madame Sousatzka (MacLaine), an Russian-American immigrant in London, a pianist-manqué-turned-piano-teacher, is a bitter middle-aged spinster, lives alone in her cluttered apartment with pictures of many a prodigious musician, some of them are her students.

Her harridan temperament doesn’t stop her from getting promising students, simply because she is a goddam competent teacher, her latest protégé is a 16-year-old Manek (Chowdhry) of Bengali extraction, whom she deems to have great potentiality, but high hopes breeds complications, not least the conflict between Manek’s overprotective single mother Sushila (a perversely feisty Azmi radiates animation and street-smart) and Sousatzka who has been building an increasingly close bond with the young boy.

As she proudly professes, Sousatzka not only teaches musicology, but life itself as well, and she is not malleable of her disciplines, particularly regarding when Manek will be ready for public performance, problems arise when Manek is approached by producer Ronnie (Lawson) to arrange his debut performance, and a rival music teacher Leo (Rietty) may have his own design on snatching Manek under his tutelage. But, what director John Schlesinger flintily homes in on is that their extant teacher-student rapport is already insalubrious, it is the overflowing maternal affection Manek receiving on a daily basis from two “mothers” that drives him away from Sousatzka, the sad truth is that it is a lesson the latter fails to learn from, and Manek is simply not the first.

Be that as it may, Ms. MacLaine vigorously injects a spit-fire assurance into her character, she takes no prisoners in magnifying a lonely woman’s hardened obstinacy. Occasionally smitten with the glimpses of a dreadful past that she thinks is the bane of her failure, she is equally eloquent in quieter, even wordless scenes. Sousatzka is anything but a warm person, habitually leery of anyone around her, as if the whole world is scheming against her, and never for one second, she lowers down her guard in front of other people. However, we do feel for her in the end, skulked by a dashed dream and an unfulfilled life, it is more than understandable that she pours all her energy to nurture those unpolished gems and sometimes, overreaches herself for her role in their lives, and who can be the wiser?

On a lesser note, MADAME SOUSATZKA genuinely finds a surrogate family in the residents of the shambly building where Sousatzka resides, Dame Peggy Ashcroft’s last screen role is the kind-hearted Lady Emily and Twiggy as Jenny, a talentless wannabe-singer, is problematically served as Manek’s age-inappropriate crush for her outward allure only.

As a protean wire-puller, Schlesinger stages a series of almost mind-bending sequences with frenzy in Sousatzka’s studio whenever she harangues Manek or lays into various interruptions, and during the final concert, a visceral whirlpool of suspense and elation is remarkably palpable along with all the simulated musical virtuosity and positively, MADAME SOUSATZKA stands on its own as the last great picture made by Schlesinger in his fairly extraordinary career.

referential entries: Schlesinger’s MARATHON MAN (1976, 7.3/10); Damien Chazelle’s WHIPLASH (2014, 8.7/10).