‘A Piece of Sky’ Review: Things Fall Apart as a Choir Sings in an Impressive, Austere Alpine Tragedy
variety.comGuy Lodge Film CriticThe hills are indeed alive with the sound of music in Swiss filmmaker Michael Koch’s intimate Alpine epic “A Piece of Sky,” but if you go in expecting twirling frolics, expect to be harshly disappointed.
Acting as a kind of distinctly non-Greek chorus, a full Helvetian choir pops up between the acts of this small-scale domestic tragedy, their solemn folk songs lending a mournful running commentary to this story of a mountain family undone by medical misfortune and psychological upheaval.
It’s a quasi-absurdist flourish in an otherwise austere slab of rural realism — cast with non-professional locals — and emblematic of the arresting formal grandeur that Koch brings to ostensibly modest material.
That combination of downbeat storytelling and rigorously mannered styling makes “A Piece of Sky” a challenging proposition for arthouse distributors, though a special mention from this year’s Berlinale Competition jury is indicative of the rarefied but rapt following it ought to find.
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