REEL JAPAN

Score: 8/10

FAKING BEETHOVEN is a unique outing in the history of Japanese cinema. Written by Bakarhythm, noted Japanese screenwriter and comedian who brought us the recent comedy hit HOTSPOT, it is based on Kagehara Shiho’s 2018 nonfiction book and features superb acting from a huge cast, but lead Yamada Yuki carries the film. He plays Anton Schindler, Beethoven’s devoted and obsessed secretary whose curious relationship with the truth and ambition to document the maestro’s legacy creates friction with musicians and historians. The film has been billed as “the greatest scandal in music history.” This is far from the truth, but the value of its story is a character study of a man obsessed and his fateful decision to pour all of his creativity into an unworthy cause. Nasty grudges and intricate deceptions abound. The film is not so much about music as about obsession. 

The film features a framing device, in which the actors of the film perform double duty as both the historical figures and contemporary schoolteachers. Looking bored and sullen behind his piano, one music teacher (Yamada) narrates the story to a boy who left his pencil case in the classroom. It immediately brings to mind THE WIZARD OF OZ, with Ray Bolger as a farmer AND the Scarecrow, Margaret Hamilton as Miss Gulch AND the Wicked Witch. Is it necessary? This is not a modern fairytale in the style of L. Frank Baum, Michael Ende, or William Goldman. The framing device is clearly designed to explain and excuse the use of an all Asian cast to portray 19th century Europeans. Was it all in the mind of one forgetful child? Perhaps it was just a dream, but using the vibrant Japanese film industry with all its technical and actorly resources in this way opens up a world of possibilities. 

Yamada Yuki has done excellent work in GODZILLA MINUS ONE and WHAT WILL YOU DO, IEYASU? Furuta Arata is excellent in a supporting role as Beethoven. The actor’s job was to showcase the two competing sides of the genius’s character, the two sides being fought over in the memoirs of his secretaries, students, and friends. Furuta aptly and efficiently highlights those facets, one more heroic and one more human. The excellent Shota Sometani appears halfway through the film as the American investigative historian Alexander Wheelock Thayer. 

The soundtrack faithfully reproduces a greatest hits reel from Beethoven’s works. Those performances and the music editing are not as sublime as AMADEUS, or even IMMORTAL BELOVED, but the music does transport us into a lost world. Frequent use of CGI backgrounds is not too distracting. I do not imagine there are many locales in Japan that can stand in for 19th century Vienna excepting a few neighborhoods erected in the Meiji era. The costumes are opulent. Antique furniture, musty drawing rooms, and bookshelves filled with leather-bound volumes carry us into the story (which is about competing books, after all). 

Although it is no AMADEUS, and Schindler’s agonizing journey can be a bit of a slog, I have chosen to assign a score of 8/10 with extra points for daring. 

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