An Imperfect Cadence

A young, aspiring harpist gets tangled in the strings, as well as in her relationship with her mother, as the biggest audition of her life looms.

Yvonne (Connolly-Burnham) is a session musician who is on the up-and-up. She has gained a mastery of the harp and is managing to impress those who are paying her to play, so much so that she has been offered an audition for the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. At home, Yvonne’s mum, Maria (Preston), who is also a harpist, is just as excited as she is, except for the fact that her years of experience in the industry are telling her that they both need to keep their feet on the ground.

This sort of tough love and hard-won appreciation from her mother is something that Yvonne has had to deal with her whole life, and it’s written all over her face. Still, she knows it’s time to get down to some hard graft, and so she sets about practising the prescribed compositions of Henriette Renié with all the vigour of a seasoned performer. However, in a nod to The Witches Of Eastwick (1987), Yvonne begins to practise so hard that she breaks a string and severely cuts her finger, introducing a thread where we find out that she has a pre-existing problem with her hands.

This condition remains undisclosed throughout the entire film and is never mentioned outright. Instead, we watch as Yvonne continues to pop pills at regular intervals and we see that her hand gradually becomes more and more discoloured the longer that she plays. Maria, far from being Mother of the Year, then begins to get a twinkle in her eye and an idea pops into her brain which could help them both out as Yvonne struggles to get herself ready for the all-important audition. The relationship between mother and daughter then becomes the main driver of conflict, more so than the relationship between musician and instrument.

The main themes then, in An Imperfect Cadence, are well handled by writer/director Nathan Haines. The double hander of the women’s relationship adding pressure to the life-changing audition works well, and the two themes intertwine seamlessly with each other. The acting from both leads adds to the realism of the story, with Louisa Connolly-Burnham and Jennifer Preston each naturally embodying their characters, keeping the everyday actions of living together as much in the foreground as the more performative aspects of what they are trying to achieve.

With neither actress having previously played the harp before this film, the stand-in shots integrate perfectly into the scenes, and it’s impossible to tell that it’s not them creating the music we hear. However, there is at times a slight mismatch between the audio and the visual, where the ADR takes the audience out of a scene and causes a disconnect between the viewer and the film. This, along with a few continuity issues, such as a finger obviously not getting caught in a drawer as it’s played to be, and Maria somehow being trapped inside a locked house behind a Yale lock, along with the unexplained hand condition, detract somewhat from the overall enjoyment of the film.

What Haines has managed to achieve with An Imperfect Cadence is truly impressive, with professionals from a large number of specialities being drafted in, across several locations, to contribute to the final product. His abilities as a director of people may well outshine his abilities as a director of film, however, and there are aspects of An Imperfect Cadence that just don’t come across that well. The story and the dialogue are very well fleshed out though, and they carry the themes throughout the film all the way to the denouement, which, in turn, may or may not appeal to the viewer with the ease of which it is achieved. There is plenty to recommend An Imperfect Cadence to the viewer for the fifteen minutes that it runs for, but at times it may be that Haines was more prescient than he knew when it came to naming his film, as the wrong notes are all too easy to pick out.