ИСТИНА

Nina Berberova’s best known fiction book, The Accompanist, tells the story of a talented singer and her unmatched accompanist. Curiously though, the book is in many ways musically ‘silent’: whilst rehearsals and concerts are featured prominently, Berberova gives almost no indication of what was sung and played. Claude Miller’s film adaptation of the novel, however, manages to overcome this ‘silence’. Miller’s film is full of carefully curated musical pieces, all of which further the narrative—i.e., not the fabula of Berberova, but rather Miller’s interpretation. Miller’s re-telling of Berberova’s story about Russian emigrants draws upon a parallel in French history: emigration during the Second World War. At the beginning, Iren, a Ukrainian-born French singer, performs German classics for Nazi officers (N.B. the writer herself was thought to be a collaborator but this has never been acknowledged). At the end of the film, Iren sings in French on BBC Radio after a long and difficult journey to London through the Pyrenees, Spain and Portugal. The apotheosis of Iren’s artistic career is the notoriously tricky aria from Massenet’s Thaïs. Significantly, the aria’s libretto bears a striking similarity to the love story of Iren and Jacques, a hero of the French Resistance. However, the film does not follow the same course as Massenet’s opera, which is mainly concerned with the atonement for sin; nor does it follow Berberova’s ‘libretto’, where nothing is sinful if it is authentic. Not being connected at all, these two texts— musical and literary—give the film an aspect of multidimensionality, rich with the various possibilities that are important for Miller (the man whose version of The Seagull has a surprisingly happy-ending).