Music Review: Angela Schanelec’s Challengingly Postmodern Take on the Oedipus Myth

Among the purposefully subdued works of the Berlin School group of filmmakers, Angela Schanelec’s stories of deeply felt but largely unspoken emotions can be the most challenging and, at times, the most rewarding. Her pictorially beautiful, narratively obscure approach demands that we fill in gaps in both plot and emotion, given that her actors, like Bresson models, aren’t prone to directness. With all this in mind, Schanelec’s Music feels at once like the most accomplished example of her peculiar style and, particularly in the film’s back half, like something of a mismatch between form and content.

Crudely summarized, the plot of Music consists of a modern re-telling of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex. At the start of the film, an infant with injured feet is retrieved from a stone hut in a Greek hillside and adopted by a kindly couple (Marisha Triantafyllidou and Argyris Xafis). Much of this prologue is told obliquely, with long angles on figures straggling their way across steep inclines. A male figure carries what seems to be the body of a woman, falling to his knees and crying out. A dead body rests in a pool of blood. The crying baby is taken from the hut.

Schanelec composes her shots with a beautiful but harsh precision, holding them longer than even the contemporary masters of slow cinema, but the primary action always seems to be just off screen, either spatially or temporally. In fact, the most impressive component of this style is how much she’s able to get the viewer to piece together, and how captivating it can all be. It’s as if she wants us to play the absent film in our head during the long stretches of silence that begin and end virtually every shot. Later on in Music, for example, we have to infer two characters’ pivotal love when we witness the purchase of some foot ointment and bandages.

After the baby is taken in, a flash forward brings us to the child’s young adulthood. From this point out he’s played by Aliocha Schneider, and much later we glean from Schanelec’s ultra-sparse script that his name is Jon. This stretch of the film is nearly dialogue free, and acted out in a kind of deadened pantomime, presenting events that contain elements familiar from a sultry erotic thriller but never remotely approach the erotic. On what seems to be a group of young people’s holiday to Greece, another man ends up dead by Jon’s hand—the first key to unlocking the twist of fate that unites Music’s main characters—and he’s off to prison.

While incarcerated, our tragic hero falls in love with Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), a prison worker who ends up settling down with him after his sentence is over. Much is still left literally and metaphorically unsaid during this section of the film, but the action grows somewhat more cohesive—there’s even a single sequence of shot/reverse-shot dialogue—as Jon’s life assumes the appearance of normalcy. He and Iro have a daughter, Phoebe (played by Frida Tarana, later by Ninel Skrzypczyk), and the three of them help out in his stepparents’ pomegranate farm. The disorder of Jon’s tumultuous youth has given way to stability, but as he wanders in and out of Schanelec’s long shots wearing glasses, you may glean that the man is destined to blindness.

Gauging Jon’s reaction to the tragedy of his life is difficult, as Music’s actors are often reduced to silent automatons, registering nothing akin to the melodrama or even the naturalism we might expect from a story of death, guilt, and tragic coincidence. Just as ancient Greek tragedy concerns the subjection of mortal life to the whims of the gods, so do the humans here behave more like empty mechanisms than agents. Even as events continue to align with grandiose tragedy, one reads little resistance to so much encroaching unhappiness on the characters’ faces.

In Music, song might be seen as the one exception to this submission to the gods, a human protest against fate. Schanelec periodically fills the soundtrack with lachrymose opera pieces, some sung by Jon himself in a syrupy falsetto. Honing the open emotion down to the intense feeling of this music—and otherwise mostly directing actors to react to things in a kind of deadpan—proves to be oddly moving, and in a way that seems only Schanelec can achieve.

At the same time, though, the marriage of this consciously operatic material with the dialed-back-to-negative-11 dramaturgy finally begins to grow somewhat tedious in the final stretch of Music. Schanelec’s previous feature, I Was at Home, But…, implicitly draws its lack of order and straightforward emotion from its characters’ grief over the recent death of a family member. In contrast, the splintered Oedipal narrative of Music can feel more like an exercise, a more developed application of the same methods to a more familiar story.

There’s a ludic element to Music’s structure. As viewers, we’re invited not just to draw the connections between the events of the film and the Oedipus myth, but also to read between the lines, to infer story from indirect signifiers. It’s a puzzle whose edges are complete but whose center, the parts of the picture most others would focus on, we have to imagine for ourselves. Initially, more than mere fun, this makes for surprisingly affecting storytelling, but once you’ve figured out how to play, the game begins to feel a bit, well, ancient.