Chris Kraus’ Four Minutes left me cold. I’d read other reviews prior to the screening, the bulk of which promised a complex, “believable and engaging” exploration of human relationships, to which our film festival’s official synopsis nodded eagerly, saying yes, yes, it would “seduce (even) the most cynical hearts”. So I was quite unsettled in the full, darkened theatre while Four Minutes unfolded, when despite having made an earnest effort to care, even towards the end, I really just couldn’t.

Maybe I missed something. Looking back, the important film elements were there in full glory: the production was thickly impressive, the cinematography rich and voluptuous. The atmosphere was painstakingly set; convincingly savage and icy in the unfeeling, institutional manner of a penitentiary just doing it’s job. The fictional German prison depicted was peopled by believable young female criminals and their believably detached caretakers, all of whom wore fierce faces and thick skins in the company of each other. And the lead actors bled into every corner of their characters’ skins marvellously. Monica Bleibtreu plays Frau Traude Krüger; an elderly spinster who revokes any patronising thought you might be tempted to gesture her way. Her wry, brusque manner is possibly conducive to – or alternatively, consequential of – a sixty year long career at the prison, teaching criminals of all cut and creed to play the piano. Hannah Herzsprung snarlingly, scowlingly, heaves life into convicted murderer, Jenny. Jenny wears her bruises on her sleeve and disguises them with sulk. Vulgar and sullied, perpetually teetering on a fit of violence, she is the kind of girl you want to gape in shock at. But dare not. If Kruger can prune Jenny’s wild unharnessed musical genius, and Jenny can let herself be taken under Kruger’s tutelage, both could find redemption, of sorts, at an upcoming Young Pianist Competition. So the story is a classic coach and protégé piece, where starkly opposite but bound together – first by love of the game, then by tenderness towards each other – teacher and student confront demons and make revelations about their pasts as they hurtle towards the final tournament.

And it was here, I think, that the movie came unstuck. For a film with this premise to be convincingly pulled off there needs to be a staunch backstory that simmers beneath the surface, from whose pool enough bubbles up through to give credence to the characters’ otherwise impenetrable behaviour. In a thoughtfully developed story you can sense some hot and sinuous structure flexing in between the lines delivered, behind the scenes depicted. But Four Minutes lacked that. It felt like everything that the scriptwriter knew about this story, was told – baldly. And that was all there was. As though the writer wrote a world they did not personally know. Without the scaffolding a strong backstory provides, this movie’s marvellous embellishments, the cast, the production, the camerawork and so on, exist as merely that. Embellishments. It seems the thing I thought I missed wasn’t really there in the first place.—Mythily Meher