This biopic of Sergiu Celibidache, the renowned Romanian conductor who refused all recordings, is a sturdy labour of love directed by his son
Here is an old-fashioned biopic from central Europe that is also a labour of love on the part of its director: a little stolid and stately, yes, but robustly made, heartfelt and high-minded, with workmanlike performances and decent visual effects work. It is the story of the Romanian conductor and composer Sergiu Celibidache, a brilliant musician who became renowned among musical connoisseurs in the years following the second world war for his unique and uncompromisingly purist belief – derived from his Zen Buddhist studies – that music should never be recorded. He believed that LPs and CDs were inert and dead, and that music had to be experienced live, in the passionately authentic present.
The director is the musician’s son, Serge Ioan Celebidachi, and as an older man in his rural French retirement, he is played with unsubtly querulous hauteur by John Malkovich, especially in the misjudged opening scene where he yells at Japanese executives for presuming to offer him a recording deal. Ben Schnetzer is the younger Celibidache, a prodigy whose musical ambition infuriates his old-fashioned father (Sean Bean), a well-regarded functionary who assumed that his son would follow him into public office. Celebidache Sr therefore demands the return of his birthday gift, a certain type of yellow tie that had been favoured by generations of the family’s menfolk, and which here becomes a fetish of the heartbroken young Sergiu’s need to please his father but also break away from him.
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