SPEAKING IN STRINGS
A film review by Christopher Null
Copyright 1999 filmcritic.com
filmcritic.com
Sometimes it can be fun an interesting to watch a documentary about someone you've never heard of. Of course, now I feel embarrassed -- apparently this Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg is a virtuoso violinist that everyone knows. They even did a piece on 60 Minutes about her.
Well color me a fool. Described by music critics as "frightening" and "posessed" while she played, the story of the borderline-crazy Nadja reminds one of another virtuoso: David Helfgott, immortalized in SHINE. Through present-day interviews plus archival footage of her practices and concerts, we get to see what those music critics were talking about: Nadja is a nutbar when she's playing the fiddle. And she's good, too.
All of this would be humorous were it not for her accidentally lopping off part of her pinky and later attempting suicide (the gun jammed). And two weeks after the suicide attempt, she played Carnegie Hall.
I'm not sure what lessons we can learn from Nadja's life, but her story (a breezy 73 minutes at that) is an interesting one.
RATING: ***
|------------------------------|
\ ***** Perfection \
\ **** Good, memorable film \
\ *** Average, hits and misses \
\ ** Sub-par on many levels \
\ * Unquestionably awful \
|------------------------------|
MPAA Rating: NR
Director: Paolo di Florio Producer: Paolo di Florio, Lilibet Foster Writer: N/A Starring: Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg
No Web site
--- Christopher Null - null@filmcritic.com - http://www.filmcritic.com
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews