SFIFF Review: The Phantom Carriage

It's not a job that garners instant sympathy, like coal miner or bomb-squad cop or personal assistant to Harvey Weinstein, but pause for a second to contemplate the plight of the modern film festival programmer: Every three days, somewhere in the world, there's a film festival. There are not, however, a hundred and sixty-odd brand new films that would allow every fest to be a wall-to-wall blanket of world premieres. Many festivals offer revival screenings of classic material in a new light (I have happy memories of Don McKellar introducing a brand-new uncut print of Cronenberg's The Brood at Toronto a few years ago) as a way of offering something new. Many combine musical talents with older films to create unique experiences in viewing that, unlike some festival circuit films, can't go from town to town because they're unique live experiences. At this year's San Francisco International Film Festival, audiences had a chance to see one of those signature experiences – a screening of the Swedish 1921 horror-folktale The Phantom Carriage, with an original live score by local resident and pop music legend Jonathan Richman.

Richman's most familiar to mainstream audiences for his work as the singing narrator in There's Something About Mary – a tragedy on the same scale, and of the same nature, as if people only recognized Marlon Brando from his sleepwalking work in Superman. Richman's work – with his first band and as a solo artist – has gone from pretty much helping invent American post-punk with The Modern Lovers to raucous children's music to more gentle (but never banal) ventures into folk- and European-influenced acoustic songwriting. He seemed, at first blush, like an odd choice to compose a score for a 80-year old film; watching Richman lead an 8-piece orchestra on the stage of San Francisco's historic Castro Theater, however, any possible concerns about stylistic whiplash were washed away by the shimmer and grace of the score as it unfolded before the audience.

The Phantom Carriage tells the story of Edit (Astrid Holm), a dying Salvation Army worker racked by consumption on New Year's Eve. On her deathbed, she longs to have one final glimpse of the man she never stopped trying to redeem – David Holm (played by director and writer Victor Sjöström). Holm is in a graveyard, drinking with two other men, relating the legend of how the last person to die before the stroke of the New Year is bound, doomed and dammed to spend the next year driving the phantom carriage – the horse-drawn conveyance Satan employs to receive the souls of the hell-bound. Holm laughs off the tale – as he's laughed off every cautionary warning in his life of willful sin and unrepentant hurtfulness – but when he collapses and perishes just before midnight, only to wake confronted by a man he knows died last New Year's Eve, he's finally confronted with a judgment and duty he cannot shirk or laugh off. ...

As a film, Sjöström's effort is actually surprisingly modern – there's some state-of-the-1921-arts special effects, and more importantly, there are moments in the film where you can spot possible influences on everything from Bergman's The Seventh Seal to Kubrick's The Shining. The film plays like a Swedish take on A Christmas Carol – a little chillier and harsher than Dickens's tale, but nonetheless along a similar line where a sinner is confronted with his wrongs by otherworldly forces.

The Phantom Carriage is mostly familiar to film scholars; what made this screening so unique was Richman's score – everything from cold, chilling bells to gentle, flamenco-influenced strumming and woozy, shuffling almost klezmer-like passages. Richman's got a deft ear for a pop tune – as anyone who's ever heard his compositions knows – but this was something different, and unexpected; very modern art being used to help bring an older work – archaic and old-fashioned, full of the clutching and over-emoting of silent film – to a new life as something unique. In a perfect world, Janus Films – the noted preservation house that lent a brand-new print of The Phantom Carriage to the San Francisco International Film Festival for this project – would release a DVD of the film with Richman's score as a demonstration of how new effort can put classic art in a whole new light – but, for now, the packed house at The Castro got something no other festival could offer them, and that seems like a triumph in itself. In an age where big-budget films play on 3,000-plus screens for weeks on end before shuffling off to an eternal afterlife on DVD and cable, where festival films like The Signal and The Devil Came on Horseback and Red Road (all deserving films, in their way) play a crazy-quilt of regions as they go from Cannes to Toronto to Sundance to SXSW to Dallas AFI to SFIFF, seeing something you know you'll only have the chance to see once is a rare pleasure; in this case, the mix of a well-made classic film and an unexpectedly perfect score made for something magical, and truly unique.