tosca's kiss (il bacio di tosca) [dir daniel schmid 1984]

The Goethe institute on Exhibition Street is a small venue. You get neither trailers nor adverts. There's a homely air to the red seats. It feels not unlike a school hall.

The films they show are not mainstream. My friend recommended Tosca's Kiss. I knew nothing about it. The film is a documentary, made over twenty years ago. In it's company the audience visits the Verdi home for retired musicians in Milan. The opening and closing shots of the building are the only exteriors in the whole film. The rest is captured in people's rooms, in the dining room, in an old storage room, on the stairwell.

The featured characters are all over seventy, and most will be dead by now. Some sung with Callas. Others refer to Caruso as though they knew him, as they may have done. Many performed in New York, Rio, Buenas Aires or Montevideo. All have opera in their bones. The caretaker and the cleaner appear. The cleaner sings with one of the former sopranos. The small audience in the Goethe Institute burst into applause. The staff say that no-one lives in the present in this place; everyone exists in a golden past.

Schmid captures these characters with a disarming charm. It would not be hard to make the film seem like an exercise in nostalgia, but the film resists. Instead, it is a study of ageing. The characters sing with enthusiasm. They play around. They are arrogant or self-obsessed, they are kindly or lovable. Age doesn't seem to have induced wisdom, neither has it dulled their appetite for life.

I don't care for opera. By the end of the film I was happily swimming in it. Within the film, opera feels like the folk music of Italy. There's only the one shot of the outside world, but few films have ever transported me to the country of their filming so effectively. Revealing that a country is made up of the personages who live, age, and will die there. As the film began I feared that ninety minutes in this world would be stretching it. When the credits rolled it felt like the viewer was being forcibly removed from a quirky corner of musical heaven.

requiem [dir. hans-christian schmid]

I was told that this was a horror movie. That might be the result of my informant's lack of attention to detail, or it might have been misleading publicity. There is certainly more than a hint of The Exorcist about the film, and there's a rumour that this was the case that seminal horror was based on.

Horror movies get made and horror movies sell. The shelves of DVD rental shops are littered with low-budget, cheaply made horror flicks, responding to our carnal need to be scared within a secure environment. Most horror movies are cynical exploitations of some kind of acute suffering. Requiem boasts that it is based on a true story. It's German. There has to be something terrifying in store, I thought as I settled back into the Curzon Soho seat. However...

Requiem is not a horror movie. Yes, it does feature an exorcism, but this is not a Friedkin, heads- spinning exorcism. This might even be the real deal. The camera hovers outside the room where the exorcism takes place, reluctant to intrude on Michaela Klinger's torment. An afternote informs us that this is just the first in a series of exorcisms she will undergo.

The director, Hans-Christian Schmid, isn't interested in the sensational, box office aspects of the story. He's interested in Michaela. The film makes us make friends with her, just as her two suprisingly decent university friends do. She's an epileptic oddball, on the cusp of implosion, and she knows it. She may be possessed by demons, she may not be. It depends on what you believe in. Michaela, as she tells her new class on her first day at University, believes in God. Her class mates laugh at her, but the teacher of pedagogy asks one of them what they believe in, and all they can say is they don't know.

In a sense, Requiem is a rites of passage movie: young woman goes from sheltered background to university, finds herself. The unsettling thing is the self she finds seems to belong to the Dark Ages. In a remarkable performance, Sandra Huller suggests that Michaela has chosen her fate, absorbed it like the saint she reveres, or a mother, or a businesswoman. A weaker performance from the leading actress would leave Michaela looking like a victim or a psychotic, but Huller manages to incorporate Michaela's unimpeachable selfhood into everything she does, whilst others around her are influenced by superstition or peer pressure.

Requiem is not always an easy ride. There are no cheap thrills. Being possessed by demons, be they real or imagined, is not an easy or a thrilling experience, the film suggests. Meticulously located in what one imagines to be an accurate recreation of the seventies, this is the flip-side of The Exorcism, and all the tacky 'horror' that film spawned. A braver legacy is implied, whose suffering is so acute the director refuses to dwell on it, instead celebrating the life this cursed woman lead.