Measures for a Funeral: Story of a Lost Concerto Goes Far Beyond the Music

By Chris Knight

Rating: A-

Part ghost story, part history lesson, Measures for a Funeral takes the bones of a mid-century violin virtuoso — Canada’s Kathleen Parlow — and wraps them in a cloak of modernity, as a music researcher (Deragh Campbell) tries to track down a lost concerto that was dedicated to her.

There is much truth here. In 2015, a manuscript copy of a violin concerto by Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen was indeed rediscovered at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music Library, after having been lost for more than a century. Parlow, who died in 1963, had played it three times in 1909, but there had been no performances since. It was finally restaged some eight years later.

María Dueñas in Measures For a Funeral

There is much fiction here too. Campbell plays Audrey Benac, a Canadian grad student writing her thesis on Parlow. She is floundering, having just broken up with her boyfriend and dealing with the imminent death of her mother, an aspiring violinist who blames her musical failure on the birth of her daughter.

Campbell does the heavy lifting in this story, and proves more than capable. In many ways she resembles a young Tilda Swinton, not so much in her physicality but in a kind of unearthly mix of emotion that she can hold in her features for longer than seems possible, blinking quickly but otherwise unmoving. In this film, she often seems oddly blank, but in a thoughtful rather than thought-free manner. And she can collapse quickly into fear, panic or - in two vital scenes backed by powerful music - tears.

Measures for a Funeral was directed and cowritten by Sofia Bohdanowicz alongside Deragh, her frequent collaborator (the two also made a 2018 short called Veslemoy’s Song on the same topic).

I must admit I am something of an ignoramus when it comes to classical music, barely able to tell a violin from a viola. But Measures for a Funeral also has much to say on the broader subject of music, and indeed sound.

A fantastic scene finds Audrey interviewing a sound archivist who curates a collection of antique wax cylinders, proudly noting that their so-called flaws serve as a kind of fingerprint of the age in which they were made, and the times through which they have since passed. Audrey later refers to them as “containers through which the past could be entered.”

We also see her attempting to reach out and touch the history of her subject through photographs, journals (delivered in voiceover by Mary Margaret O'Hara, an actress and composer in her own right) and even by visiting her old haunts, some of which she may still be haunting.

The musical performance that closes the film is a wonder to behold, letting the story end on a note both triumphant and elegiac. 

Measures for a Funeral. Directed by Sofia Bohdanowicz. Starring Deragh Campbell, Maria Duenas, and Melanie Schiner. Opens Nov. 7 in Montreal, Nov. 12 in Sudbury, Nov. 14 in Winnipeg, Nov. 29 in Vancouver, Nov. 30 in Edmonton, and Dec. 7 in Toronto.