Review of Mobile Étoile (2016) by Howard E — 04 Dec 2016

Hannah Hermann (Géraldine Pailhas) and Daniel Dussault (Luc Picard) are a couple in their mid-40s, living in Montreal. (She is French; he is Canadian.) Along with their violin-playing teenage son, David (real-life teenage composer/violinist Alexandre Sheasby), and a few friends, they perform little-known, late 19th century French-Jewish liturgical music to appreciative audiences around town. But life isn't easy for the group known as Les Cantiques ("The Canticles"). One of their singers is moving overseas, government grant money is slow in coming and they lose their rehearsal space. Though they find a more than apt replacement mezzo-soprano in the young and rebellious Abigail (Éléonore Lagacé), it's Hannah's former music professor, Samuel (Paul Kunigis), who throws things into a spin when he insists that the piece of music that he rediscovered can only be sung in the way it used to be sung more than a hundred years ago. Abigail, however, sees beauty in the piece and wants to sing it her way. The clash divides not only the group but husband and wife as well.

This is a unique premise, and the music and singing are nice to listen to but, unfortunately, together they don't add up to something that makes for gripping viewing. Artists with money problems and the conflict between those who insist on artistic purity versus those who like to interpret are subjects that are simply not exciting to watch. The film is directed by French-Israeli Raphaël Nadjari, who has seen previous success with such Israeli hits as AVANIM ("Stones") and TEHILLIM ("Psalms"), but even those films move at a snail's pace and are not to everyone's taste.

While the performances in this film are all good - Lagacé's real-life mother, Canadian soprano Natalie Choquette sings for Pailhas - and it's interesting to listen to and learn about this obscure musical genre, it doesn't succeed in the end. NIGHT SONG is only for the most serious of music lovers or French cinephiles.