Shostakovich Movie Strikes Sour Notes

It is hard to dismiss Tony Palmer’s “Testimony,” a high-concept film based on the memoirs of composer Dmitri Shostakovich, which airs tonight on PBS.

But if you don’t zap it midway in a fit of pique (and many Shosty admirers will do so, pronto, screaming “intellectual tripe!”), you must shed any hope of a glimpse into the inner workings of the Soviet composer who died in 1975 as perhaps the 20th Century’s greatest symphonist and one of its most troubling enigmas.

Palmer’s “Testimony” is tenuously based on Shostakovich’s memoirs, purportedly “narrated to Solomon Volkov” and published in 1980. Volkov’s publication of the composer’s rambling recollections caused a storm, partly over the authenticity of the statements and partly because Volkov was seen as an apologist for a composer who more than once cooperated with Soviet officials during Stalin’s reign of terror.

Palmer, who co-wrote, produced and directed “Testimony,” is true to the memoirs only in its fervid development of the theme of Shostakovich’s tangled relationship with the Soviet political machinery and its ruthless chief manipulator, Josef Stalin. Stalin’s shadow crossed everything in Soviet life, including the arts. As the memoirs show, Shostakovich carried the scars long after Stalin’s death in 1953.

Shostakovich was a victim, a portrait of an artist who was not a hero. He was too frail to fight, never a Solzhenitsyn, and not strong enough to abandon his country, like an Igor Stravinsky, who later denounced him.

Shostakovich closed his eyes and stayed in the Soviet Union while Stalin’s monstrosities swirled around him, producing an output that included 15 symphonies and an equal number of string quartets, two operas and six concertos.

His music has a permanent place, yet Shostakovich’s complicity has left his persona, at least in the world music community, in a kind of limbo. One hungers to know the man, what made him do the duplicitous things he did, but Palmer would argue that there is little sense in knowing the man outside his political context. And so for 2 1/2 hours, “Testimony” plays out Shostakovich’s struggle with Stalin on an abstract psychological landscape, like one long Eisenstein propaganda film with a sound track by Shostakovich.

Shot in grainy black and white, Palmer’s “Testimony” has the dank atmosphere of Orwell’s “1984” and the dense, bureaucratic texture of Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil.” It is intercut with documentary film footage and filled with garish angles, shadows, hand-held camera effects and a busy sound track.

As he loosely visits a chronology of Shostakovich’s life, Palmer dashes notions of time and reality and feels no need to be entirely comprehensible to the viewer. Palmer’s intent is a kind of ecstatic collage, a visual bombardment of fast-edited images.

“Testimony,” which begins at Shostakovich’s funeral, seems very much like the hallucinations of a dying man, a life passing before one’s eyes.

Ben Kingsley, of “Gandhi” and “Betrayal” fame, plays Shostakovich with a kind of earnest intensity that unfortunately cannot seem to make it out from under Palmer’s visual pyrotechnics.