The Incredibly Talented Lucy review – a sparkling story, with an enraging twist ending | Television & radio
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Tthe creators of Channel 4’s reality/talent show The Piano probably thought they had a hit when they came up with the format, but the moment they knew they’d failed must have been when they found Lucy, 13 -year-old girl from Halifax, West Yorkshire. Blind, neurodivergent and prone to tossing her head to the left during performances by the likes of Stevie Wonder, Lucy was just what The Piano was – inviting amateurs from all over the country to play the piano at the railway hall, then arranging for the best to play it in concert at the Royal Festival Hall – I was looking.
Inevitably, Lucy is now starring in a documentary where we learn more about her and see what happened next. We get a good look at Lucy at home and at school, enjoy hearing her play a lot more piano – Debussy, Duke Ellington, Bach – and get to know her wonderful, loving mother and the teachers and classroom assistants who encourage her every day on matters other than music. But The Incredible Talented Lucy is not primarily a Lucy movie. It’s about Daniel.
Daniel has been Lucy’s music teacher for over a decade; viewers of The Piano saw him guide her to the keyboard and watch her tenderly as she performed. He taught Lucy by placing his hands on hers to show her how to turn the music in her head into sound that others could hear, giving a girl with limited speech access to an invaluable, limitless means of self-expression. We see how important their relationship is to Lucy in the use of Daniel’s name: “Daniel!” she says when reminded of an upcoming lesson. “Daniel!” she exclaims when they meet. “Daniel!” the shout when she plays a piece brings her joy.
Restless and a little disheveled, but sparkling when Lucy plays well, which she usually does, Daniel is the archetype of the obsessively devoted music teacher. We see him bravely pursuing the hopeless task of conducting a school orchestra that sounds like a fire in a bagpipe shop; even more rewarding, he also has one-on-one meetings with children who have disabilities or challenges similar to Lucy’s and who shine under his guidance, just as she does.
We also speak to Daniel’s concerned wife, who worries about the unbearable amount of extra hours he works every week because he knows these kids need him. The funding needed to properly address their needs is long gone. The latest episode of The Piano airs during filming – when Daniel is interviewed on BBC Radio 5 Live, he makes sure to make a case for more money for music education for all. Later in the show, Daniel talks about the weight his self-imposed responsibility has taken on him in the past: he, it turns out, wasn’t Lucy’s savior. They were each other.
If their relationship is pseudo-parental, Daniel is honest about the challenge it presents. While his own jazz trio plays to a handful of people in Halifax, he guides someone who could become a famous concert pianist. He wants Lucy to be shaped as a serious musician, not an “exhibitionist” – the question is whether that will be more rewarding for her or for him. At home, Lucy has learned to make a smart speaker play the sound of cheering from a crowd, but she still can’t articulate how much performing in front of an audience on a regular basis would mean to her. About halfway through documentaries like this there’s often a low-key triumph that sets us up for a bigger one later, but here a concert where Lucy fills in for Daniel in his trio is derailed by her playing when she wants to, which isn’t always is when the drummer and bass player expect.
“I’m projecting my musical life onto Lucy, that’s the problem,” says a distraught Daniel backstage. However, a hindered adult living under a gifted child is a problem that we trust this sensitive person to manage successfully, as is the fact that Lucy’s own musical life cannot realistically be lived out in its entirety with Daniel at her elbow her, as painful as it is for him to admit it.
The finale is Lucy’s appearance at the invitation of the royal family to play the Coronation Concert at Windsor Castle in May 2023. Minutes before she takes the stage, there’s a twist that the writer of any future Lucy movie won’t need finesse; she returns to the theme of her growing up and abandoning Daniel, while quietly hinting at something rotten and infuriating in our society, reinforcing the underlying motif of Daniels and Lucious being trampled and abandoned to the nation. They need and deserve more help than a heart-warming documentary can provide.
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