IFFK 2025: The ebb and flow of a luminous life

A modern trance beat is not something one would expect to hear in the background score of a period movie on a legendary 19th century musician. This choice of music, incongruous with its settings, ushers us into Polish filmmaker Michal Kwiecinski’s Chopin, a Sonata in Paris, which chronicles the last few years in the life of Frederic Chopin, who lived only till the age of 39.

The film, being screened in the World Cinema category at the 30th International Film Festival of Kerala (IFFK), gave a musical opening to the first day, along with Ingride Santos’s Ruido, on a young up and coming African rapper’s struggles to make it big. Kwiecinski’s film is equally concerned with Chopin’s musical journey as it is with his tryst with debilitating tuberculosis.

Citizenship as gift

In its best phases, we see him transform from a reluctant performer to the toast of soirees, enlivening the salons of Paris with his music and his witty impersonations, in the company of Franz Liszt, another popular composer of that period. His sonatas regale even King Louis Philippe I, who gifts the Polish composer with an honorary citizenship of France. But, away from the bright stages and wild parties, it is in teaching the piano to his students that he finds his peace. That is until tuberculosis takes over his every being. 

At one point, French writer Aurore Dupin (who writes under the pen name George Sand) with whom Chopin is involved in a stormy relationship, tells Chopin “You are wallowing a bit too much in self-pity”. The same can be said about the movie, which has repetitive sequences of his struggles with tuberculosis. If the film rises above the ordinariness of these scenes, the credit goes to Eryk Kulm, who internalises all the fascinating complexities of Chopin, which has led to several films being made on him in the past.

The larger politics

The other characters, except that of Dupin and his young student, are not fleshed out enough to register in our minds. Towards the end, the larger politics of the period, especially the revolutions of 1848 comes into play as a side note. The latest film on Chopin might not match up to the beauty of one of his calming ‘Nocturnes’ pieces, yet it manages to capture the sadness in the fading away of a luminous being who had music flowing out of every pore.