Music – first-look review

Aus­tere; ellip­ti­cal; chal­leng­ing; rigid. These are all terms that describe the cin­e­ma of Ger­man writer-direc­tor Angela Schan­elec. Her lat­est fea­ture, Music, is a puz­zling for­mal exer­cise that may seem impen­e­tra­ble even for those who are famil­iar with the filmmaker’s brand of high­ly seri­ous post-nar­ra­tive con­struc­tion. The unini­ti­at­ed are faced with the much more daunt­ing chal­lenge of com­mit­ting to an opaque struc­ture that, cou­pled with a glar­ing lack of expo­si­tion, make it near­ly impos­si­ble to glean the links between the film and the Oedi­pus myth that has been inspired by.

Shot in true Schan­elec fash­ion – lengthy, sta­t­ic, care­ful­ly com­posed shots, in this case depict­ing coastal and moun­tain­ous land­scapes – the film tra­vers­es a not-so-dis­tant past in Greece (sig­ni­fiers in cloth­ing and cars hint­ing at the 1980s) before mov­ing to urban locales in present-day Ger­many. When the frame is not com­plete­ly still and fixed on fig­ures in the dis­tance, slow yet pre­cise pans fol­low the ges­tures of hands and feet and cre­ate hap­tic images. The nar­ra­tive – most­ly dom­i­nat­ed by omis­sions – intro­duces a new­born boy found in a stone hut on the road­side, who is quick­ly adopt­ed and named Ionas by a cou­ple who bap­tise him on the coast by sat­u­rat­ing his small, red­dened feet in sea­wa­ter. When we see Ionas again, he is a young adult played by Aliocha Schnei­der, recog­nis­able by his bruised heels. 

A car acci­dent inad­ver­tent­ly leads to his involve­ment in a trag­ic death and, even­tu­al­ly, to his incar­cer­a­tion, where he meets-not-so-cute with a female prison war­den named Iro (Agathe Bonitzer) – Schanelec’s ver­sion of Jocas­ta. Iro intro­duces him to baroque music, the title slow­ly find­ing its way into the film through its evoca­tive use of Bach and Pergelosi. The pair become a cou­ple and have a child togeth­er, pro­vid­ing Schan­elec with her idio­syn­crat­ic para­me­ters to explore the core of the myth­i­cal tragedy.

Although Ionas and Iro are both native to Greece, and though both char­ac­ters have a flu­ent com­mand over the lan­guage, their spo­ken Greek is stiff and osten­si­bly sat­u­rat­ed with the actors’ own French accents. There’s an overt arti­fi­cial­i­ty root­ed in this lin­guis­tic stilt­ed­ness that only points towards the gen­er­al func­tion of lan­guage through­out Schanelec’s cin­e­ma. Rather than act­ing as a tool for res­o­lu­tion or com­mu­ni­ca­tion, lan­guage imbues each banal line of dia­logue and lacon­ic inter­ac­tion with the same air of aus­ter­i­ty that per­me­ates her rejec­tion of nar­ra­tive convention.

To deci­pher and derive mean­ing from a film this dense and obtuse is a Her­culean task that only becomes eas­i­er when look­ing at it less a stand­alone fea­ture, but rather as a fas­ci­nat­ing addi­tion to the filmmaker’s body of work. Grant­ed that a view­er can for­go the need for nar­ra­tive log­ic and become entire­ly sus­cep­ti­ble to the sub­tle details that lie with­in the abstract­ed mate­r­i­al fields of her cin­e­ma, all that’s left to do is plunge head­long into the affec­tive charge of image and sound.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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