Measures of a Funeral

Canadian filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz has spent the better part of a decade making short and medium-length films as a means of excavating her own personal family history. With a runtime of nearly two and a half hours, her new film, “Measures for a Funeral,” arrives as her most ambitious work to date, and as a culmination of her collaborations with actress Deragh Campbell. More than just a leap in scale over her previous work, “Measures” suggests an expansion of Bohdanowicz’s directorial sensibility. An austere and gloomy drama, “Measures” reminded me of “Tár” just as often as it evoked Bohdanowicz’s own work – not something I expected.

The story is borrowed from Bohdanowicz’s short “Veslemøy’s Song,” with Campbell resuming the role of Audrey Benac, the director’s alter-ego. Audrey is a floundering grad student whose thesis subject is the real-life Kathleen Parlow, a renowned 20th century violinist who taught Audrey/Bohdanowicz’s own grandfather to play the violin. Determined to make sense of Parlow’s life and artistic legacy, Audrey sets out from Ontario for London and Oslo to visit where Parlow lived and honed her craft. Simultaneously, Audrey is grappling with her mother’s declining health, from which her research serves as a distraction. When she discovers a lost concerto that was composed specifically for Parlow, Audrey organizes a restaging of the piece, and finds something like a bridge between her ancestral past and her foggy present in the experience of live music.

Tonally, the movie can seem at odds with itself. On one hand, this is a highly cerebral film. Exchanges of dialogue have the feel of academic discourse, like when Audrey and a friend sip beer in a London pub and discuss how sound and material objects persist differently through time. There’s a separate impulse towards eerier, more ominous terrain, much of which is grounded in Audrey’s grief. The integration of these two instincts can be awkward. This is also the first Campbell/Bohdanowicz collab where Campbell’s lightly affected performance style seems out of place to me. In their shorter films, her deliberate mannerisms fit with a broader sense of formal play and experimentation (I love her crisp, delicate narration in her “Velesmoy’s Song”). Within the more conventionally dramatic context of “Measures,” Campbell’s acting leaves Audrey as more of a construct than a flesh-and-blood human. What kept me leaning in was more visual in nature: Bohdanowicz’s precise eye for cloudy European locales, lonely research libraries, and dusky music halls.

“Measures of a Funeral” is playing the 2024 edition of the Vancouver International Film Festival, which runs from Sep 26 - Oct 6 (https://viff.org/festival/viff-2024/).