The unheralded genius of the genius’s sister

Virginia Woolf, in her famous polemic “A Room of One’s Own,” imagined the fate of a fictional sister of William Shakespeare. Judith Shakespeare might have been as talented as her now-legendary brother. But without the opportunities open to him — schooling, a wife to keep house — her genius would have gone unrecognized. We’ll never know if Woolf’s theory would have proven true. Just as we’ll never know if Nannerl Mozart, the sister of Wolfgang, was as talented as her now-legendary brother. It seems more than likely, however, that some female genius has been lost to posterity, simply because of the times in which they lived.

“Mozart’s Sister,” a lush French period piece, is also a piece of imagination, one that gives us a somewhat dubious flight of fancy hung on facts that are few. As the film opens, the Mozart family — father Leopold (Marc Barbe), mother Anna-Maria (Delphine Chuillot), son Wolfgang (David Moreau), and daughter Nannerl (Marie Feret, 15 and the director’s daughter) — are traveling through France, making their way through the courts of Europe to show off the two musical prodigies. It’s a tough path to travel, and not just literally: The family was sometimes made to wait weeks for penny-pinching aristocrats, on whose delight the family made their fortune, if one can call it that.

ON SCREEN
‘Mozart’s Sister’
» Rating: 2.5 out of 4 stars
» Starring: Marie Feret, Marc Barbe, Delphine Chuillot
» Director: Rene Feret
» Rated: Not rated
» Running time: 120 minutes

The daughter is nearly five years older than the son, and showed her talent first. But the older she gets, the clearer it becomes that marriage, not music, must be her career. In the tight quarters of the carriage, the singer and harpsichordist complains that she’s no longer allowed to play the violin. “Your father keeps telling you it’s no instrument for a girl,” her mother reminds her. “Nor the organ nor the violin,” chimes in her brother, who is now getting the attention that once went to Nannerl.

Nannerl Mozart’s name is well known, but her music is not — evidence exists that she composed, but no manuscripts have been found. Rene Feret imagines that the Dauphin of France (Clovis Fouin) was an admirer who encouraged her, though she could only perform publicly her compositions while dressed as a boy. It’s a storyline that makes for great beauty — scenes were filmed at Versailles — but not a lot of sense.

“Amadeus,” Milos Forman’s great film about the master, might also have been more fiction than fact. But it still seemed more authentic. Perhaps it’s that it grappled with a centuries-old problem: How can mere mortals make transcendent music? Here we see young Wolfgang as a child, engaging in the play typical of the young, even young geniuses. But “Mozart’s Sister” only imagines a solution to a dilemma that might or might not have existed — it never makes that possible problem real to us.

Still, it’s a film whose writer-director understands that though the world is filled with beauty, it could very well have been filled with much more. And so this beautifully shot film is, in the end, one that reminds us that potential is more often than not unrealized.

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