The Ghosts of Girlhoods Past in “Sound of Falling”
Decades later, in the eighties, we meet Erika’s niece Angelika (Lena Urzendowsky), a bespectacled, dark-haired teen-ager, growing up in what is now the German Democratic Republic. She casts longing glances toward the river—West Germany, and a different life, lie somewhere beyond. Angelika exudes a precocious sexual awareness, and she notices the creepy stares she gets from her uncle Uwe (Konstantin Lindhorst) and her cousin Rainer (Florian Geißelmann), even if they seem to have no idea. “I often pretended I didn’t notice how they looked at me,” Angelika says, in voice-over. “But it was actually me who was secretly watching them looking at me.” Her present-day counterpart, an adolescent named Lenka (Laeni Geiseler), soon learns to do the same in the face of male attention.
There is power in unspoken knowledge, Schilinski suggests, and the performance of innocence and naiveté, for a young girl, can be an instrument of subversion. But the movie doesn’t fall into a blandly homogenizing trap; it knows that each era holds horrors all its own. It is little Alma who explains, with chilling incomprehension, her family’s routine practice of sterilizing the help: a maid, she tells us, was briefly sent away to be “made safe for the men.” On rare occasions, a voice from one chapter will comment on events from another. Angelika notes that, after the end of the Second World War, many young women like Erika headed to the river to drown themselves. “They feared what might come more than they feared death,” she says. “Sound of Falling” is, in part, about how tragedies and traumas reverberate across the generations. Over the course of a century, the untimely deaths of at least three girls are recorded; a fourth disappears and is never seen again. Sexual abuse is a quietly tolerated scourge. Characters dream of running, of escaping, of becoming someone else entirely.
These are heavy subjects, marshalled in service of a potentially deterministic thesis: you might shudder to think what a director like Michael Haneke, a master of punitive art-house formalism, would have done with the same set of characters and themes. (Alma’s mother, mirthless and severely coiffed, could have been piped in directly from “The White Ribbon,” Haneke’s icy drama about a northern German village on the eve of the First World War.) Schilinski goes in the opposite direction, with a countervailing lightness of touch. It’s as if she wanted to avoid the usual cinematic expressions of violence, which by now produce only a benumbed indifference, and to suggest the habitual brutalization of women without depicting it onscreen. In training us to orient ourselves, moment by moment, she stimulates the viewer’s mind into a heightened state of alertness and feeling. It’s a brilliant instinct—and “Sound of Falling,” for all its intricate premeditation, feels entirely instinctual.
The German title of Schilinski’s film is “In die Sonne schauen,” which translates as “Looking Into the Sun.” It’s not a title with an obvious interpretation, though it did make me remember a scene in which Angelika tries to get her mother, Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading), to locate her blind spot—a physical exercise with a clear metaphorical application. Irm is an anxious, self-conscious, fearful woman, and Geisler-Bading gives the film’s most subtly wrenching performance; her character seems permanently out of synch with the world, unable to look past her own unhappiness. Angelika, by contrast, is farsighted enough to put words to this condition: “You only ever see others from the outside, but never yourself.”
The English-language title presents even more of a mystery. In one scene, when a young girl takes a fatal tumble from a hayloft, the sound cuts out entirely. Is the sound of falling merely silence? The words bring to mind the classic riddle about whether a tree, falling in the forest, makes a sound if no one is around to hear it. The film might be posing another version of the same question: Can we feel the joy, sorrow, confusion, and anguish of those who have come before us, even if they were never with us? Could our own feelings, in fact, be the psychic residue of those long-ago experiences?
Perhaps that is why “Sound of Falling” so frequently resembles a ghost story—why the farmhouse feels so indelibly haunted, and why the camera seems to drift between rooms and time frames with the whispery grace of an apparition. Schilinski leans into the spookiness. Her film is unapologetically obsessed with death, and it invites us to look, more than once, on the faces and bodies of the dead. The director seems especially fascinated by the early twentieth century’s farewell rituals, suffused with religion and superstition. A deceased great-grandmother has stones placed over her eyes, to ease her timely passage through the afterlife. Alma’s older sister Lia (Greta Krämer), gone far too soon, has her eyes sewn open—and is then posed, sitting upright, for a family photograph.
Our own age is so oversaturated with visual media that it’s a bit startling to be reminded of an era when the significance of such images—of material evidence that one’s loved ones existed—could hardly be taken for granted. Alma cannot shake one photograph in particular: a portrait of another late sister, who died before our Alma was born. She was also named Alma, and they share an astonishing physical resemblance. Could they be, in fact, the same soul, one that has now passed through two different bodies? Schilinski, ever the trickster, isn’t saying. But even her most impish conceits are undergirded by a fundamental conviction, a belief in the power of art to wake the dead. ♦
