Within the opening moments of “Music,” the tenth function movie from the German author and director Angela Schanelec, thunder claps, wind whistles, and a heavy fog rolls throughout a mountainous panorama, someplace in Greece. Below cowl of darkness, a person (Theodore Vrachas), heaving and sobbing, struggles to hold a girl, who’s bleeding and unconscious; he provides up, units her down, and clambers away on his personal. The following morning brings an ambulance, a silent Greek refrain of frowning male faces, and a startling discovery: a child boy, a weepy bundle of non-joy, is discovered, and rescued, on a close-by farm. Across the similar time, a goat casually pokes its snout into the body, as if anxious to know what the hell is happening. You’ll share its curiosity, and maybe a few of its incomprehension.
Have we stumbled upon a modern-day nativity scene? In a way, sure, though Schanelec has excavated her story from the ruins of an older, pre-Christian storytelling custom; the goat, with its satyr-like associations, is as a lot an indication as it’s a supporting character. Watch “Music” intently—and there’s actually no level in watching it another method—and you’ll uncover the sturdy bones of the tragedy of Oedipus, bent and twisted, nearly past recognition, right into a modern-day retelling. (Relaxation assured that I’ve revealed lower than nothing, and that Schanelec’s film, probably the most narratively unorthodox U.S. launch I’ve seen this yr, is as impervious to plot spoilage as historic mythology itself.)
In time, the infant is adopted by a kindly couple, Elias (Argyris Xafis) and Merope (Marisha Triantafyllidou), and given the identify Jonathan, or Jon. The kid’s new mom gently bathes him on a seaside, cupping and pouring seawater over his tiny ft, that are mysteriously scuffed and bloodied. Moments later, Jon has develop into a good-looking younger man (the Canadian actor and musician Aliocha Schneider)—a improvement that now we have to work out for ourselves, since Schanelec’s modifying technique is as poker-faced as they arrive; a single reduce in her films can span a number of hours, a number of days, or greater than a decade. The one clue she gives—and it’s sufficient—is a closeup of Jon’s naked ft rising from a automotive, nonetheless pink and torn up all these years later. Jon is Oedipus, however he may also be Achilles, and, positive sufficient, not lengthy after he bandages his wounded heels, destiny offers him a life-changing blow: there’s an undesirable sexual advance, a defensive shove, and, instantly, a person lies lifeless at his ft. On this telling, the lifeless man is not Jon’s organic father, although each males are performed by the identical actor, Vrachas—an ingenious little bit of Sophoclean sleight of hand.
From there follows a breathless succession of hardships, interlaced with small but unfailingly tender mercies. The following scene finds Jon behind bars, the place, in a beguilingly anachronistic contact, he and his fellow-prisoners put on cothurni, the thick-soled buskins that actors clomped round on in historic Greek tragedies. The jail guards, in the meantime, are all younger girls clad in midnight blue, none extra strikingly so than the dark-haired Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), and we sense that she and Jon are fated for love from the second they first lock eyes. Locking eyes, by the way, is the principal type of communication in a film the place dialogue is sparse and exposition nonexistent. (Because it occurs, “Music” gained a screenplay prize on the 2023 Berlin Worldwide Movie Competition—a discerning alternative in a class that usually errors elaborately crosscutting plotlines and reams of verbiage for good screenwriting.) Schanelec’s actors have sharply planed, fiercely expressive options—faces that you can think about being chiselled in limestone—they usually ship a lot of their performances in wordless closeups, their eyes staring intently at one thing offscreen. Solely half the time does she proceed to point out us what they’re looking at.
The impact of this system is at the very least twofold. It acknowledges, on the one hand, the bounds of notion, the slim subjectivity of the human gaze; what we see so not often comports with what others see, not to mention with the presumably extra expansive imaginative and prescient of the gods. On the similar time, the film’s emphasis on the importance of wanting carries the burden of an crucial, one which appears keenly directed on the viewer. The act of wanting might typically deceive or mislead us, however additionally it is, Schanelec suggests, the one method to make sense of the advanced and confounding world that this film inhabits.
Aliocha Schneider performs Jonathan, the protagonist in Schanelec’s modern-day retelling of the tragedy of Oedipus.
Schanelec got here to prominence, within the nineteen-nineties, as a number one member of what got here to be often known as the Berlin College, a loosely structured motion of German filmmakers, together with Christian Petzold and Thomas Arslan, typically recognized for his or her politically astute, genre-inflected realism. However her dreamlike formalism has lengthy resisted the affect of any collective credo, and the extremely refined performing fashion that she’s come to elicit from her performers, typically described as Bressonian in its avoidance of extraneous emotion, is one purpose for that. In “Music,” the acute deal with sight and notion takes on nonetheless extra resonant echoes within the context of Oedipus, who bodily blinds himself at exactly the second his eyes are figuratively opened to the horrors of his destiny. That irony is reproduced right here, in mercifully much less eye-gouging phrases, by the thick glasses that Jon begins sporting across the time he and Iro develop into lovers—a romantic improvement that Schanelec breezes proper previous, with typical financial system and understatement. Jon’s eyesight could also be failing him, however Iro opens his ears, by giving him a cassette filled with classical recordings that he listens to in jail. (The cassette—together with a rotary phone that pops up in a later scene—means that these occasions are happening throughout the nineteen-seventies or eighties; the story will finish, years later, in a smartphone-heavy current day.)
And so a Vivaldi aria erupts on the soundtrack, and earlier than lengthy Jon opens his mouth and begins to sing, in a beautiful, quavering falsetto. (His favored repertoire is a set of songs written particularly for the film, by the Ontario-based musician Doug Tielli.) Right here, lastly, you would possibly assume, is the music that “Music” has promised us, although such a conclusion ignores Schanelec’s exceptional attentiveness to sound—significantly within the unaccompanied early stretches, when the clanging of goat bells, the bursts of thunder, and the rippling waters of the Aegean Sea kind their very own wilderness symphony. A extra extreme interpretation of the title would put aside the matter of sound fully and acknowledge the distinctly musical resonances and harmonies of the film’s construction, which Schanelec underscores with a wealthy sample of visible repetitions. Pictures, statically shot and superbly lit, recur in ways in which solely progressively reveal a sequence of significance: a lifeless man’s head, leaving a smear of blood on a tough floor; a distant glimpse of a seaside cove at three completely different factors, forming a gradual but perceptible crescendo from idyllic to tense to devastating. When Jon’s adoptive father, Elias, stumbles down a set of stairs on the top of the story’s anguish, his faltering gait harks again to an earlier scene, through which he stepped anxiously by way of a doorway, nervously clutching the toddler he would quickly declare as his personal.
The idea of the household tragedy might have originated with the traditional Greeks, however it has additionally offered a gentle dramatic anchor in Schanelec’s latest filmography. In “The Dreamed Path” (2016), a title that would simply as properly apply to “Music,” she confirmed us a person’s wrenching despair on the lack of his mom. The marvellous “I Was at Residence, However . . .” (2019) adopted a girl and her two younger youngsters someday after the dying of their husband and father; the film’s elliptical, fragmentary construction appeared nearly a by-product of the characters’ grief, an outward reflection of their inward shattering.
“Music,” in contrast, retains transferring onward, leaping from a jail to a pomegranate farm, after which onward nonetheless, with out clarification, to the bustling streets of Berlin; the circulation of time appears to speed up at any time when tragedy strikes, as if the movie had been taking every disaster in stride. Time doesn’t heal all wounds, the story suggests; it merely forges forward so relentlessly that these wounds quickly lose their narrative primacy. Schanelec doesn’t short-circuit or gloss over trauma; she lingers simply lengthy sufficient, and he or she is aware of that grief units its personal distinct emotional rhythm. That’s why, after witnessing the lethal fallout of a automotive crash, a girl walks far after which instantly stumbles, dropping to her knees as the total weight of what she’s noticed sinks in. In contrast, when a younger woman (Frida Tarana) attends her mom’s funeral, she doesn’t fall to the bottom. The way more devastating element is that she’s sporting what we acknowledge as considered one of her mom’s outdated clothes—a near-throwaway contact that implies simply how persistently she is going to cling to the lady’s reminiscence within the years to return.
Like many artwork movies of a sure aesthetically adventurous, formally rigorous, narratively indirect persuasion, “Music” will most likely be ignored by most and dismissed by many as excessively difficult at finest and woefully obtuse at worst. However that overlooks the piercing, fully accessible emotion that Schanelec layers into her story, typically in ways in which would appear counterintuitive in much less assured palms. There’s a specific melancholy in Schanelec’s determination to have the fresh-faced Schneider play Jon in any respect phases of maturity, with no prosthetic enhancements or different exterior indicators of growing old, past these symbolically freighted glasses. It suggests—together with the hard-won smiles and lilting melodies that creep into Schneider’s efficiency—a spark of resilience in Jon, as if he had been being untethered from the grim future {that a} extra inflexible studying of Sophocles would demand.
And so “Music” arrives, in time, on the banks of a river in Berlin—a imaginative and prescient of lush German modernity that strikes a palpable distinction with the sooner, dustier scenes of rural Greece. In a single prolonged monitoring shot, captured with a mobility and a freedom which have evaded the film till now, Schanelec directs her characters to sing a chunk of music—“Oh, gods! Why? You’ll be able to depart me alone in tears”—that by some means feels extra like a triumph than a lament, a joyous rejection of mythology’s dependable fatalism. It’s as if Jon, in contrast to Oedipus, has discovered to soak up tragedy slightly than let tragedy soak up him. ♦
