Remembering Jacqueline du Pré (1994)
Directed by Christopher Nupen

Ostensibly a look back on the life of the cellist (a prodigy who was forced to give up playing after being diagnosed with multple sclerosis at the age of 28), this is really just a framework in which to show some of the most incredible footage ever shot of any musician, period.

Having said that, I now must warn that the film also features perhaps the worst narrator of all time, a British man with easily the most sleep-inducing voice ever recorded. Within 35 seconds of him speaking in his monotonous and bored tone, the viewer is automatically agitated and wants nothing but to sleep to blot out the misery.

Fortunately, he doesn't speak for more than 90 seconds at a time, and the pain is relieved instantly when he stops and the film is once again given over to long stretches of unnarrated footage.

Classical music nowadays does not mean anything close to what it did to society even 30 years ago, having shrunk to a very small minority of the listening populace. Yet classical music has not lost its relevance so much as suffered from poor marketing.

For me, I respond to the scandalous figures, the tragic figures, the "celebrities." I love Callas and Glenn Gould, Bernstein, Jacqueline du Pré – performers who were able to inject a little soap opera into the stodginess.

It's difficult for people who grew up in the 80s and 90s to relate to the shock value a lot of these performers had when they first entered the classical music world; there hasn't been a good, juicy story to rock the classical world in two decades.

I mean, Yo-Yo Ma isn't likely to be arrested for child pornography, and I seriously can't see Anne Sofie-Mutter having a torrid love affair with Evgeny Kissin. But in the 60s, these things might have been possible (well, not so much the child porn thing).

Young players were breaking into the scene with a lot of flair and virtuosity, infusing the old world stuffiness with some new vitality. Ironically, these hip, shocking players are now the ones that make up the "old guard" (Itzhak Perlman, Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman). At the time this footage was shot, though, they were just kids playing like they owned the world.

The bulk of the film is given to performance footage, mostly taken from rehearsals rather than concerts, which lends the proceedings an informality that allows the viewer to really get caught up in the players' passion for what they are performing. Intercut with the performance footage are interview-style monologues from du Pré, her main teacher and "Cello Daddy" William Pleeth, and her best conductor, Sir John Barbirolli.

What comes across instantly is du Pré's rare energy and her uncommon vivaciousness. Footage of her goofing on the piano (at nearly concert level) while an amused Barenboim looks on, or in the studio sound-checking an intense passage from a concerto, only to pretty much skip like a schoolgirl off the platform when finished, depict a performer whose seriousness was reserved for the music, but who was not consumed by it to the point of unbalance. In several interview segments she actually comes across as quite hilarious.

Further amusement can be found in a truly baffling but infectious bit where du Pré, Perlman, Barenboim, and Zukerman all switch instruments and goof off backstage before a performance – du Pré playing a violin like a cello, Perlman fumbling around the cello, Barenboim on bass (!) – then go out to perform Schubert's Trout Quintet in all seriousness. Now there's a flippancy you won't get from Sarah Chang.

More amazing is a segment where du Pré, Barenboim, and Zukerman are performing a Beethoven trio in a huge drawing room of an old English mansion – and the film just rolls as they make magic, carefully studying each other for cues and performing as though they are the last people left on earth. Quite stunning. And footage of Jacqueline performing the Elgar cello concerto (her signature masterpiece) is simply wonderful.

You don't have to know a damn thing about classical music to enjoy this film a lot, because like any good documentary it lets its subject unfold naturally. Nupen is wise to allow for long, wordless segments where the music does the talking and the expressions of the musicians tell the entire story.

Remembering Jacqueline du Pré is not super-informative in terms of facts (her childhood, her passionate affair with and marriage to Barenboim, her last years), but it says more about du Pré as a musician than an A&E Biography ever could, even one with Peter Graves.

Review by Ed Answer