Composer Gustav Mahler's (Robert Powell) life, told in a series of flashbacks as he and his wife (Georgina Hale) discuss their failing marriage during a train journey.

Both trifles and structure are tossed out the door by director Ken Russell in this film. Here, historical content matters less than metaphors, feelings, emotions, and interpretations. Pay close attention, as every word and frame is intended to be important. The film takes place on a single train ride, in which the sickly composer Gustav Mahler (Robert Powell) and his wife Alma (Georgina Hale) confront the reasons behind their faltering marriage and dying love. Each word evokes memories of the past, so the audience witnesses events of Mahler's life that somewhat explain his present state. Included are his turbulent and dysfunctional family life as a child, his discovery of solace in the "natural" world, his brother's suicide, his (unwanted) conversion from Judaism to Catholicism, his rocky marriage, and the death of their young child. The movie weaves in and out of dreams, flashbacks, thoughts, and reality as Russell poetically describes the man behind the music.—Jonathan Dakss <[email protected]>

In 1911, Gustav Mahler and his wife Alma Mahler Georgina Hale are on a train from Paris to Vienna, the last leg of their journey home. They left New York and his commission conducting the New York Philharmonic earlier than expected in he not feeling well. He would admit that while conducting pays the bills, it for which he has current fame, his passion is composing, an associate telling him that he is probably destined to be renowned in this time for conducting the music of the masters, he only being considered a composing master in the future much like those earlier masters didn't receive their renown until after their deaths. Gustav and Alma's marriage has seen better days in she believing she more his glorified housekeeper with her playing second fiddle to his music, and he dismissing her own songwriting aspirations. Incidents on the train, most between husband and wife, are the impetuses for remembrances to his past and/or symbolic dreams. Beyond those issues in the push and pull between conducting and composing, and Gustav and Alma's marriage, both happy and not so happy times, the latter exacerbated by her old beau Max Richard Morant also being on the train, those other remembrances and dreams include to his childhood and his troubled relationship with his overbearing and sometimes violent distiller father Bernhard Mahler Lee Montague, and his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism.—Huggo