Patti Smith is no stranger to pretentious twaddle. Still, she deserves praise for supporting this magnificently strange mockumentary from New Yorker Jem Cohen. Its central characters, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara) and Johann (Bobby Sommer), are all but invisible to the world at large. The film itself will struggle to get a look-in (even with Smith’s name attached). Spread the word: it mustn’t be allowed to disappear.
The film starts with Johann, a middle-aged gallery attendant at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, filmed on the job, his ruminations providing the polite, deadpan narration. Then Anne trickles into the story, a broke and breathy Canadian who is visiting the city because her friendless cousin is in a coma.
With Johann’s help, Anne is able to kill time gracefully — they visit bars, go on walks and ask each other probing questions. She resembles a bruised version of 10,000 Maniacs’ Natalie Merchant. He’s sleek and tidy. And yet we can believe that they, like the cousin, have fallen out of any meaningful kind of social network. The ease with which valuable people become lonely is beautifully conveyed. Isolation: it’s the waste-product of city life.
Museum Hours is melancholy yet full of humour; educational and entertaining. It provides gulp-inducing insights into Bruegel’s work, for example. It also touches on Dutch still lives and the kind of punk whose talk is peppered with references to “late capitalism”. You never know which way the narrative will turn (at one point, all the museum-goers get naked). Fans of O’Hara, at least, won’t be surprised when Anne starts crooning in a voice that makes the heart skip. An indie legend, O’Hara’s last studio album was made in 1988. As Anne, she performs two songs (Dark, Dear Heart and Never No).
Art is where you find it. As for the tribute to troubadour Vic Chesnutt... It’s the blue icing on the cake.
