'Sound of Falling' Review: Cannes Competition Kicks Off With a Time-Hopping Mood Board

As if to quell any lingering gripes about an opening film that could be generously described as wafer-thin, organizers from this year's Cannes Film Festival kicked off the Palme d'Or competition with a film of profuse (and maddening) complexity. Free-flowing and leaden, novelistic and allusive, dour and flowery, Mascha Schilinski's "Sound of Falling" can take just about any adjective you want to dish, layering them all into a time-hopping mood board that follows four families, all living in the same German farmhouse over the course of a century. Any attempt to diagram the kin . . .