The Stranger

A paean to Bach by experimental Catalan filmmaker Pere Portabella, The Silence Before Bach alternates between overlong narrative vignettes and short, sweet surrealist flourishes. The vignettes: a truck driver picks up a hitchhiker who can play the Goldberg Variations on his harmonica (Bach’s geometric constructions sound impossible and new through the wooden wheeze of a harmonica); a young woman takes a long, sensuous shower (Portabella, you old dog), practices her cello, and tells her older lover that she’s going to Leipzig for a Bach festival; an old man brushes his hair, puts on a Bach costume, takes the bus from his Leipzig tenement to a bar where he drinks a hot chocolate, then steps outside to greet tourists. The flourishes: player piano wheels (almost capers) around an empty hallway, banging a cantata out of itself; 20 cellists on the Barcelona subway play a suite in sweet unison; 20 pianists in a music shop play a suite in polyphonic cacophony. The best line in the film comes from a bookseller, who says to the cellist’s older lover: “Without Bach, God would be diminished. Without Bach, God would be third-rate. Bach is the one thing that reminds us that the world isn't a failure.” By Brendan Kiley