TWILIGHT SONATA
TaglinE
The enlightenment of our twilights
LoglinE
Mother and son are in rough relations when a severe stroke leaves her bedridden and unable to speak. Their quest to recover their spiritual connection challenges the constraints of reality itself.
SynopseS
(Spoilers ahead)
David is a struggling middle-aged artist who has to earn most of his living by driving a taxi. By contrast, his mother, Anahit is an esteemed professor who despite her impressive age still works contributing considerably to the family budget. With David’s wife Christine and their three children, they live together in a crumbling apartment, alienated for years because of her austere and judgmental attitude and constant efforts to control everyone as the senior of the family.
Their lives change forever when the sudden severe stroke leaves her bedridden and unable to talk. For days on end, David is stranded in the hallways of the hospital, attending to her needs, and talking to her motivating her to fight the disease and come back home where the family still needs her. She can only respond by looking into his eyes. Their eyes reveal the sorrow and regret for all they were missing in recent years of disconnection.
This routine is exhausting David, it even starts to haunt him in his dreams. Soon, however, he starts to meet his mother in those dreams, well and lively again. They regain their intimacy lost maybe since his childhood, confessing, and sharing their most intimate thoughts and memories. She shares stories from her childhood and tales about her father and their ancestors. Some materialize as flashbacks.
Behind some spectacular twilight scenes of the city, David’s voice-over tells the viewers that he will not tell them how the story ends. They can consider that the woman has recovered and returned home or left them forever as a simultaneous quantum probability like in Schrodinger’s cat experiment. In his opinion, people usually pay too much attention to the events of the story missing some other even more important things in it. He urges them to observe the beauty around them, like that fantastic evening, for example. He reads his favorite verses from a poem by Metsarents:
“I wish to become this evening, and touch the foreheads of every passerby…”
Director’s note
Every art, at least for me, begins with visions and dreams sporadically popping up in the whirlpool of our consciousness. Most of them would be forgotten soon, but some will start to haunt us, growing their artistic legs and arms over time, just like a child in a mother’s womb. And finally, the day comes when they would scream and demand their right to be born and to share the world with us. A considerable part of such an artistic process is intuitive and subconscious, and I am happy about that since it is crucial for artistic honesty. This particular project originates from a little incident that happened around 15 years ago, so dreamlike, now I doubt if it was even real.
One bleak winter afternoon I saw this really humble-looking old man with a cane who stood up to a driver bullying pedestrians at the street corner while no one else would dare. At first, the incident did not make a particularly strong impact, but soon the image of the man of such a powerful soul enclosed in such a fragile body kept resurfacing in my mind. His nearly forgotten image was transforming each time to resemble some iconic images from renaissance era portraits to iconic actors like Gabin or Stroheim. I was even imagining his life – he could have been respected and cared for the patriarch of a big dynasty, or one of those numerous lonely old people forgotten by everyone. One day he was a WWII hero, most likely an ace pilot. The next time he would reappear as an intellectual dissident who spent many years in Soviet jails. Those logical and emotional meditations would reach even further, raising questions of what things like nonconformity, character, heritage, ancestral connection mean to me and why do I grow so respectful to the generations who unlike us lived through real cataclysms. Then, as my other projects took over my time and attention, those meditations somewhat withdrew to the background.
But when I lost my mother to a stroke about four years ago. Those images and reflections made a major comeback molding a solid story, and though I was somewhat resisting it, the story started to absorb certain autobiographical turns and details. The grandpa with a cane became a grandma, the elderly leader of a modern family of three generations living together, however, who are losing their spiritual connection and realizing it too dangerously late. The good news is: it’s never late.
In terms of genre, this film is a family drama, and I definitely want it to stay in that domain, even though some existential philosophic discourses unavoidably will find their way. The script, I believe, turned out to be well balanced and the main pillars of the story have the potential to resonate with the souls of every viewer regardless of their cultural background, age, or gender - the relatable and charismatic characters, the storyline premise of loss of a parent, which most of us have already experienced or are fearful of inevitably experiencing it someday.
Visual concepts
Needless to say, in order to succeed, the project must be developed and realized with perfect harmonization of all cinematic components with the objective of making the storytelling emotionally immersive and stirring. For a film belonging to one of the dramatic sub-genres, it’s natural to expect an approach within logic and aesthetics of realism. In general, this will be the case with our project. We even aim at achieving some sort of “staged documentary” feel, though the scenes with dreams will require their own aesthetic microcosm.
Like in my other projects, the city in which the characters live and act, is a remarkably active element and we aim at utilizing all the beauty that our city can offer – simultaneously bright and sad, charming and mysterious. I hope you’ll see some glimpses of that beautiful universe in our mood board and development teaser. Since the mystery of life and death is a fundamental theme, special consideration is given to dusk, sunset, and twilight.
ACTING – In my previous work, I experimented with actors’ much deeper involvement in the process of creation of the script. I believe the opportunity of investing their own spiritual feedback into the text creates a much deeper psychological connection with the character. Going from draft one to draft two, we did some work in this regard. I believe this work will be continued in the months preceding the primary shooting. Also, we consider an extremely thorough selection process and preparation for the supporting actors and extras.
CINEMATOGRAPHY – For the utilization of a realistic approach, we plan for frequent usage of handheld cameras and organic lighting. Meanwhile, with the aim of achieving fundamentally different feels for scenes of reality and dreams, we are considering an unusual solution – the combined usage of anamorphic lenses for reality scenes and spherical ones for dreams.
SOUND AND MUSIC – On-set sound and dialog recording will be utilized as much as possible. Special significance will be given to the ambient sounds of the environments. The modern abusive tradition of overwhelming music scores will be avoided at all costs. We don’t plan to use original music, and the few iconic music recordings of the past we plan to use will be delicately and logically interweaved into the story and sound environments.
