BRIDE OF THE WIND A film review by Steve Rhodes Copyright 2001 Steve Rhodes RATING (0 TO ****): ***
Being married to a musical genius can be a humbling experience, and Alma Mahler isn't the type who handles humility well. She's a free-spirited woman who despises being relegated to the role of a supporting player in her husband's triumphs.
BRIDE OF THE WIND, by director Bruce Beresford (DRIVING MISS DAISY), is a hurried, Cliff Notes version of the life of Alma Mahler, the young wife of composer Gustav Mahler and the lover of many other famous people. The movie is saved by Mahler's sublime and ever-present music and by first-time screenwriter Marilyn Levy's sporadic flourishes of brilliance. Sarah Wynter delivers an enigmatic performance as Alma, and Jonathan Pryce (TOMORROW NEVER DIES) gives a convincingly reserved version of Gustav.
The story, which spans several decades, starts in Vienna in 1902 at a time when conductor Gustav Mahler was very early in his composing career. If there were a single thing that I could change about the film, it would be in the music mix. Mahler was a powerful symphonic composer, but much of the film's wonderful background music has been mixed so that solo instruments overwhelm the rest of the orchestra. The movie's most impressive moments occur precisely when the full force of Mahler's symphonic scoring is heard. The best scene occurs when Mahler's opulent, horsedrawn hearse is pulled through Vienna as his music blasts away, mixed with rolling thunder from the storm brewing overhead.
Especially at first, Alma is not moved by her future husband's compositions, calling them "thematically disorganized and repetitive." An artist friend of hers reassures her that Mahler's music is "much better than it sounds," stealing a Mark Twain quote about Wagner.
Alma casts aside her current flame in order to seduce the shy and awkward Gustav, who has an undeserved reputation as a ladies' man. An accomplished pianist and composer herself, she is asked by Gustav, as the price of a marriage ticket, that she abandon her career since there can be only one music in the family, his.
Their initially happy life together is first shown being jarred by his proclivity for tragic musical compositions, as his one about the death of a child. A few years later one of their two daughters dies, causing irreparable damage to the Mahler family. This untimely death breaks both of the parent's hearts, and Gustav is diagnosed as having a congenital heart defect.
Alma seems inherently incapable of staying in monogamous relationships, but she does have a gift for attracting extremely talented men, including famous architect Walter Gropius (Simon Verhoeven), expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka (Vincent Perez), and writer and poet Franz Werfel (Gregor Seberg). A woman who doesn't take kindly to blending into the background, she appears to have made the wrong decision in marrying Mahler, or any man for that matter. Still, her loyalty to a husband on whom she is cheating is fascinating. When Gropius asks her to leave Gustav in order to run away with him, she turns him down flat. She tells him that her husband needs her, and, after all, "He's Gustav Mahler!" After his death, she increasingly worships him, much more than she did while he was alive.
A movie that is too often in a hurry to cover all of Alma's life, it does pause every now and then to offer tidbits of wisdom. Oskar, who hates having to make love to Alma while the bronzed bust of the dead Gustav looks down upon them, tries to convince Alma that he is a more attentive lover than Gustav ever was. After all, Oskar points out, he is willing to stop work in midday in order to have sex with her, something than Gustav never did. When Alma replies that Gustav was too busy, Oskar tells her that "time is the money of love."
BRIDE OF THE WIND runs 1:39. It is rated R for some sex and nudity and would be acceptable for older teenagers.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, June 15, 2001. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
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