Music for High-Strung Instruments

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE BASILEUS QUARTET Directed and Written by Fabio Carpi

Harmony is the wan hope of age, the last dream to which it may reasonably aspire. Virtuosity is callow youth's callous expectation, the ambition toward which its bursting energy and blustering strength heedlessly compel it. That is why, dearly as they may love their offspring, parents of prodigies are so happy to see them off to college and career. May they achieve their hearts' desires -- but please, God, on their own time.

This being so, imagine the consternation of a distinguished chamber ensemble, rich in years and adoring reviews, when their first violinist is felled by a heart attack. Their alternative is retirement or filling the empty chair. Brief experience with the former is not encouraging. After years of letting the group set their tones and rhythms, the remaining bachelors find their loneliness difficult. And without the calming core with which music provided their lives, they are restive. The appearance of Edoardo Morelli (Pierre Malet) is an unspoken prayer's answer. He is a superb musician. He is a handsome and energizing presence on the stage and in their lives. He can find women, pot or a high-stakes poker game wherever they go. He reminds them all of their lost youths and awakens their unused parental instincts at the moment when most people are gratefully abandoning them. Eventually, without malice, with quiet but unfailing good cheer, he will destroy them all.

The first to fall is Guglielmo (Michel Vitold). A repressed homosexual (and, more significantly, a repressed romantic), he cannot hold his true nature back when Edo, as he renames their prodigy, appears. What drives him mad is not open acknowledgment of his secret, but the boy's indifference to it. What's all the fuss, Edo sleepily wonders, about the central issue of his would-be mentor's life. The next to go is Diego (Omero Antonutti). Encouraged by youth's unconscious example, he vainly seeks to reclaim the woman he loved and abandoned when he was Edo's age. The boy might be moved by Diego's plight, but just at the moment he is involved with a girl revolutionary he smuggled across the Austro-Italian border. Alvaro (Hector Alterio), his sexuality dampened by illness, his ego padded by wry self-awareness, endures, but only as accompanist to the boy when he sets forth on a soloist's career, still blithely unaware of the damage he has done.

Nor should he be. In Fabio Carpi's unsentimental, indeed comic view of what would usually be presented as dark doings, youth need not apologize for its selfishness. And age has no choice but to accept it with whatever rue and wit experience has granted it.

Visually unexceptional, narratively straightforward, Carpi's film is neverthe-less intricately worked out psychologically. It plays like a lovely chamber piece, and its actors work with a good musical quartet's instinctive politesse and self-effacing skill, muting individual flights in deference to total effect. Carpi may never be a Beethoven of the cinema, but he could perhaps be a Schubert, and there are few enough of those making movies these days.