Synopsis
The Song of Names (2019) is François Girard's drama, here to watch online — a forty-year search built around one broken friendship. In late-1930s London, a Polish violin prodigy named Dovidl, his family left behind in Warsaw as war closes in, is taken in by music publisher Gilbert Simmonds and becomes a near-brother to his son Martin.
The night of his first major recital should have launched him. Instead Dovidl simply vanishes, no note, no goodbye, leaving the family financially and publicly ruined. Decades on, an older Martin — played by Tim Roth — spots a stranger gripping a bow in a way only one person ever did, and the old wound reopens. The trail runs through London, Warsaw and New York, and at each stop he learns a little more about what the boy discovered had happened to the people he loved. Clive Owen plays the grown Dovidl.
Girard, who made The Red Violin, again puts music at the center: the title points to a synagogue chant that names the dead aloud, one by one. Adapted from Norman Lebrecht's novel, the film rests on the push and pull between Roth and Owen. It suits anyone drawn to slow dramas about memory and guilt. Stream The Song of Names (2019) online on iFILM.
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