A Late Quartet: Life Will Never Be Perfect, But It Can Become Beautiful

A Late Quartet: Life Will Never Be Perfect, But It Can Become Beautiful

If you have a deep background in classical music, you will probably understand this film on an even richer level. And if you know Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, Op. 131—or have even performed it—you will surely take away even more from the film. But if that were the condition for appreciating it, the audience would be far too small. Although A Late Quartet uses Op. 131 as the thread running through the entire story, knowing nothing about the piece does not diminish the film’s emotional force in the least. On the contrary, the film may even spark an interest in the beautiful classical music that accompanies it throughout, which is something quite rare and precious. The previous film about classical music that I saw was Copying Beethoven. When the Ninth Symphony began, I was so moved that I cried. From then on, my impression of classical music changed from complete ignorance to at least a slight understanding. Although I lacked the musical foundation to deepen that understanding much further, I could at least begin to appreciate one of the most magnificent and beautiful parts of human history. If there are regrets in life that can still be remedied, then learning to understand music and painting would be among the most important. Beyond language, the only ways human beings can express emotion and thought are music and images—and the layers and depth they reveal often make language seem thin and pale by comparison.

But life is never perfect. No matter what kind of life one lives, regrets are unavoidable: the person you loved slips away, dreams remain unrealized. Even the harmonious and resonant quartet in the film, the Fugue ensemble, after 25 years of shared music-making, finally begins to reveal cracks in its sound. The cellist mentor’s illness is only the trigger, the fuse for a chain reaction of collapse. But in the end, these conflicts and collisions are really the eruption of twenty-five years of unspoken disappointment and dissatisfaction—things the film itself never fully shows. As viewers, we do not know how these characters spent those twenty-five years. What we know only in fragments are the emotional entanglements from twenty-five years ago, and the smoke and wreckage twenty-five years later. I kept wondering whether such a story could remain suppressed for so long only in a film. In real life, would this group not have already fallen apart long ago? But perhaps twenty-five years are not as distant as they seem. Perhaps they pass in the blink of an eye. And perhaps the death of the cellist’s wife a year earlier had already planted the seeds for everything that followed. We cannot really assume what life will bring, because in truth we know so little about it.

That unseen, “perfect” span of twenty-five years is like all the happy times in life. While we are living through them, we immerse ourselves in them gladly, but afterward they seem to leave almost no trace. Only when the undercurrents we ignored while we were happy begin to surge up and swallow that precious happiness do we suddenly wake from the dream and begin to sort through the wreckage. Yet in times of suffering, chaos, and pain, memory often becomes sharply clear, as if every detail is etched into the mind. The film tells a story that unfolds over only a few days, but for each character, the experience may feel longer than the previous twenty years combined. Happiness makes us enchanted and slow; suffering makes us mature and alert. The two are inseparable, like the two sides of life itself.

Back to the story: the plot may look melodramatic on the surface, but it actually feels much closer to real life. The relationships among the quartet’s main characters are intricately entangled. A and his wife raised B as their own child. B fell in love with A’s prized student C, but that love came to nothing, and B instead ended up with D, whose talent did not match C’s. In this way, A, B, C, and D lived together in apparent peace and harmony for twenty-five years. Then A’s wife died, and he himself was diagnosed with an irreversible illness. B unintentionally wounded C’s fragile self-esteem, bruised over more than twenty years; C then had a brief affair with a dancer he met while running. Meanwhile, during a coaching session, C found himself helplessly falling in love with the daughter of B and D... In what feels like an instant, the harmony of more than two decades seems exposed as a complete illusion. Yet these melodramatic turns are exactly the kinds of things that could happen to anyone. If Op. 131 contains stories within it as well, I wonder whether they, too, are made up of this same trivial and real human life.

No matter what state we are in, life does not stop moving. The Fugue quartet may disband, or it may continue, but the instruments remain, the audience remains, and problems are never solved by avoidance. Everyone has a life they must face. A perfect life is, after all, an illusion that never truly exists. But if we are willing to face things and work through them, life can still, as in this story, become beautiful. Can’t it?

The film is full of double meanings that connect music and life, which makes it especially fitting as a film about music. The actors display a very high level of skill both in their performances and, at least to an outsider like me, in the musical aspects as well. They make what could have been a dull or static film—one relying heavily on dialogue and music—feel profound and vivid, which is truly impressive. Finally, the film includes a small story about Op. 131: it says that Mozart’s dying wish was to hear Beethoven’s Op. 131, and after his death, many musicians performed the piece before his grave for days and nights. On that point alone, this string quartet would already be worth listening to.