Mahler

Ken Russell's 1974 film shows the composer Gustav Mahler looking back over his life during a train journey. His health is failing, his marriage is collapsing, and the distance between him and his wife Alma widens at every station. Russell uses that frame to move into memory, nightmare and outright invention, and the most argued-over passage turns Mahler's conversion to Catholicism into an extravagant spectacle. The director never filmed composers from a respectful distance, and here the music collides with the image rather than explaining it. Robert Powell's Mahler stays tired and remote inside the film's excess. The narrative is not chronological and does not separate the real from the imagined. Who it's for: viewers who like Ken Russell's excesses and unconventional composer biographies. Who it's not for: anyone wanting reliable information about Mahler's life; the film does not aim at it.