What do the young musicians dream of when they want to break out of their walled existence?
Photo: © Neue Visionen Filmverleih
When does a sound become music? In her debut film “Gloria”, Italian director Margherita Vicario (born 1988) shows that all boundaries are fluid. Whether a sound is perceived as noise or as music remains a question of rhythm. And the rhythm that pulses through “Gloria”, so that the film seems to come to life, is highly musical in all its facets. A successful application of Nietzsche’s “Without music, life would be a mistake”.
The director herself is a well-known singer in Italy, who effortlessly switches between all styles with her own songs, performing both as a soloist and in a choir. She has now incorporated all of this into “Gloria” – a film title that can be misleading, however, because two other films with this title have been released in cinemas in recent years.
So who is being glorified here? The variety of sounds that Thomas Mann once celebrated in his chapter “The Abundance of Harmonious Sound” in “The Magic Mountain” – using the newly invented gramophone. What Mann calls the gramophone was a mighty pianoforte in “Gloria” 100 years earlier, with all its new expressive possibilities. Everything here revolves around this unheard-of event, which sweeps aside all routine, like a stubbornly humming and whirring top.
But the euphoria about this first film, which was at least in competition at this year’s Berlinale but did not receive the attention it deserved, is immediately dampened again. This is not its fault, but that of an infantile marketing label that was slapped on “Gloria” when it was released: “feel-good drama.” What is that supposed to be, a feel-good drama? Just soft kitsch? No, “Gloria” does not seem to be that at all. Others call it a “historical musical,” but even that is insufficient.
The Berliner Zeitung even saw “Gloria” at the Berlinale as a “feminist-reactionary cake” that could easily upset one’s stomach, and another newspaper postulated: “Real girl power looks different.” Apparently everyone knows exactly what they are missing here – but hardly anyone is willing to accept the special form of this film, which is constantly carried by a vibrant musical intensity in which a long-pent-up zest for life is revealed.
The first images of “Gloria” show us gliding on a gondola over the Venice lagoon (camera: Gianluca Rocco Palma). The setting of the action, the St. Ignazio College near Venice, is one of those ambitious orphanages of which there were many in the 18th century. Venice was considered a music metropolis at the time, but the main actors mostly remained invisible.
They were orphan girls, the famous “figlie di coro” (“choir girls”), who were taught singing and string instruments behind convent walls. They also composed in secret. As musicians, they later cost little, accompanied church services – hidden behind curtains – or gave church concerts. They were also responsible for teaching music to the nobility of Venice. After all, Antonio Vivaldi, Venice’s most famous musician, was also the house composer in one of these “Ospedale della Pietà”.
The director sees the highly talented – yet constantly humiliated and regimented – young women as flowers “laid out to dry between the pages of the book of history.”
Now, 200 years later – Napoleon was soon to conquer Venice and destroy the traditional structures – “Gloria” dares to take a look behind the scenes. It is an end time, people here know about the French Revolution, whose ideals the Doge Republic is trying to keep at bay by all means. That is precisely why Venice had to be hit with full force. On the outside everything still seems as it always was. But in secret people grumble and gossip – and create their own counter-world. This is also the case with the young musicians who gather in the basement of the institute around a carelessly left piano that a famous instrument maker had bequeathed to them.
On the one hand, creative power lies dormant here – or worse, it has been brutally dispossessed by making their works anonymous or attributing them to the “masters”, such as the burned-out and cynical bandmaster Perlina (Paolo Rossi). On the other hand, musical sessions are already raging in the underground, the wild happenings of those who entertain themselves without an audience – and in doing so, break all previous norms. This seems to me to be an extremely original perspective on an end time in which the music of what is to come pulsates in secret.
So we see Teresa (great: Galatéa Bellugi), a maid in St. Ignazio who is considered mute. But she is neither mute nor deaf, but instead transforms the clattering dishes in the kitchen into her orchestra. She was locked away because she had a child by a high dignitary, which no one is supposed to know about.
Now Pope Pius VII has announced that he will be visiting St Ignazio, and a concert by conductor Perlina is to be premiered on the occasion. But he can’t think of anything – and that is the moment for the girls from St Ignazio. Of course, these female artists – and director Margherita Vicario is under no illusions – are no different from their male colleagues: there is no competition, no little intrigues and envy. But the unifying bond, the vital sound that connects them, remains.
They have one goal: to fearlessly turn the concert for the Pope that finally takes place into a scandal and to transform the expected humble sacred singing into a pop song festival. Margherita Vicario composed the film music herself together with Davide Pavanello, and it permeates this film, which is much more worth seeing and hearing than its listless critics thought, like a fabric that is extremely finely spun.
What do the young musicians dream of when they want to break out of their walled-in existence? Of Germaine de Staël, the icon of the early women’s movement in the 19th century who caused a sensation with her epistolary novel “Delphine”. Independent and free, they want to travel together through France and Switzerland to perform there. After Napoleon declared the monasteries of Venice dissolved in 1807, a new era begins for them too.
»Gloria!«, Italy, Switzerland 2024. Directed by: Margherita Vicario; Book: Margherita Vicario, Anita Rivaroli. With: Galatéa Bellugi, Carlotta Gamba, Veronica Lucchesi, Maria Vittoria Dallasta, Sara Mafodda, Paolo Rossi. 106 Min. Kinostart: 29. August.
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