The new film from Angela Schanelec is in the mold of old films from the German director: useful for a super-specific audience; massively useless for all other audiences. A certain kind of European festival would welcome its inscrutability and disregard for narrative; ditto film departments with a peculiar bent. In other words, Schanelec is back to irritate film lovers without high-level academic degrees and/or high tolerance for tedium of the wayward sort.
The film is entitled Music and does feature a fair amount of singing. But as you can guess, the songs do not pour forth with a lot of focus on melody and there isn’t a lot of charisma emanating from the performers, who are filmed with the same lingering seriousness of the film’s other scenes where the camera, as directed by Ivan Markovic, stays on characters, scenes, objects moments longer than normal. But then again, this isn’t really a “normal” film. Supposedly an interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus, it departs sufficiently from that character’s story to be its own form.
A baby is discovered abandoned in the bushes and taken home. Years later, he kills a man accidentally. The scene is filmed somewhat exasperatingly. We see one hand holding another hand and then one man moves towards the other’s lips for a kiss. A shove later and the man is dead, having fallen and dashed his skull against a rock. Jon is sent to a correctional facility and from there on his life proceeds with a fair amount of vicissitudes.
On at least one occasion around the halfway point of Music, the plot threatens to come alive in dramatic terms, if only mutedly, but Schanelec extinguishes such hopes with yet another series of scenes that are hard to care about and even harder to parse. A product of the Berlin School, Schanelec’s work here has no real emotional resonance. The film’s deaths—yes, there is more than one—hardly inspire anything in the viewer, except for the fact they occur. Although the characters feel differently. The first death produces a howl of sorrow, of anguish that is entirely out of step with the film’s ultra-subdued mood. If only Schanelec followed and replicated that level of emotion across the film. But that, surely, would be another film and a different director.
For this director and this film, the combination of music and death and maybe even myth produces material that can (or should?) only be absorbed by the intellect. Sophocles’ contrivances in the service of drama, sentiment, and plot have been compressed to yield something far less engaging for audiences who still attend performances of the original play. With all the obstructions placed in the way of the audience, it seems certain that Schanelec’s Music, whatever its intellectual merits and formally beautiful production design, will not endure in the same way. A few European art house festivals and film school classes, where it ought to spark some debate about its aesthetic and narrative choices, will almost certainly be its subsequent haven after its Berlin screening.
Fortunately for Schanelec, not pandering to Sophocles was maybe the idea. If the goal was to infiltrate the popular plot with peculiar choices and subvert its populist appeal, she has succeeded. As she says in a note accompanying the film, “I am not interested in what makes the myth unique, but rather in what it can tell us today. I’m interested in what I can share with everyone, the normal and the relatable.”
One finds it hard to believe that many viewers will find Music relatable. But everybody will agree that Schanelec really doesn’t care about what made Oedipus Rex sui generis.
Director, screenplay, editing: Angela Schanelec
Cast: Aliocha Schneider, Agathe Bonitzer, Marisha Triantafyllidou, Argyris Xafis
Producer: Kirill Krasovski
Cinematography: Ivan Markovic
Production design: Ingo Klier
Sound: Rainer Gerlach
Production company: Faktura Film
In Greek, English
108 minutes
