Four years ago I sat in a Toronto restaurant at an intimate TIFF dinner with Angela Schanelec and Canadian indie musician Doug Tielli, whom she had discovered and liked after a year of searching for the right musician for her next project. At Berlinale 2023, Tielli was next to Schanelec again, at the Competition world premiere of Schanelec’s stark drama Music. The film is loosely based on the tragedy of Oedipus, where Oedipus/Jon (French-Quebec actor Aliocha Schneider) unwittingly murders a man, goes to jail, marries his jailer-bio mother, has a daughter and moves to Berlin as he goes blind.
Tuesday, February 21. 2023
#Berlinale23: Music #review
Four years ago I sat in a Toronto restaurant at an intimate TIFF dinner with Angela Schanelec and Canadian indie musician Doug Tielli, whom she had discovered and liked after a year of searching for the right musician for her next project. At Berlinale 2023, Tielli was next to Schanelec again, at the Competition world premiere of Schanelec’s stark drama Music. The film is loosely based on the tragedy of Oedipus, where Oedipus/Jon (French-Quebec actor Aliocha Schneider) unwittingly murders a man, goes to jail, marries his jailer-bio mother, has a daughter and moves to Berlin as he goes blind.
As the title suggests, music features noticeably in Music, perhaps to express or comfort us over life's pain. Schanelec, originally an actress, was educated at the Institute for Music and the Performing Arts in Frankfurt and found her perfect collaborator in Tielli, who contributed (not enough) dreamy songs that Schneider touchingly delivers. These are the only moments where the character of Jon becomes visible or alive; the rest of the time I nearly forgot he was wandering through the film — the biggest crux of the film. The transient female characters receive more attention from the filmmaker.
More than ever Schanelec foregrounds the senses —hearing, seeing (or not, although the blindness aspect remains entirely obscure) and a pervasive nature setting derived from her favourite Southern European summer backdrop. You have to accept or appreciate the emotional challenge that you will likely come out of a Schanelec film with diffuse impressions rather than any tangible insights or cognitive understanding.
The Oedipus narrative —if one can call it that as the film is nearly wordless— somewhat anchors an initiated audience (the foot wounds; the Greek theatre shoes) while likely alienating less prepared viewers, but Schanelec is not here to make it easy for her viewers. Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian commented in an interview that “with Music, Schanelec takes her art of telling stories elliptically even further.” Indeed, the film can be read on an increasingly radical trajectory from The Dreamed Path (also Greece- and Berlin- set although more forgiving in its time and space jumps than Music) and her Berlinale winner I Was At Home, But…, nearly forming a trilogy of longing and sorrow.
Whether Schanelec is moving from ellipses to voids and starting to overplay her hand in excluding viewers from her world remains to be seen. Either way, I would venture that audience concerns do not keep her awake at night. Often grouped into the early Berlin School or a new new wave, Schanelec is a hermetic school unto herself.
The writer-director-editor makes one crucial change to the classic Oedipus myth that is intriguing in its impact: Jon does not find out about how the fates are playing with him, carrying on with his life in the face of terrible events, stoically bearing the (non-)agency afforded him. Again, in the absence of much of a plot or “action,” we’re feeling and guessing our way through the ending that comes, after two hours, astoundingly suddenly.
Music, with all its unflinching crypticness and usual visual Schanelec rigour, creates an odd or seductive clash—depending on where you stand on the Schanelec divide— between outbreaks of mythical passion and tentative meanderings through Angela Schanelec's mind. Sun-drenched beaches, glittering Mediterranean waters and homey interieurs somewhat mitigate the brutally static camera and trying long takes; romantic hand choreographies substitute any potential eye contact or tender declarations —outside of Tielli’s songs, which come (too) late as a sort of relief or reprieve.
Ultimately, Music is a film about family and fate, about finding the good in bad situations —a reference point that makes the film at least minimally approachable for very patient audiences and Schanelec disciples.
by Jutta Brendemühl
image: Ivan Markovic/Shellac Films
More than ever Schanelec foregrounds the senses —hearing, seeing (or not, although the blindness aspect remains entirely obscure) and a pervasive nature setting derived from her favourite Southern European summer backdrop. You have to accept or appreciate the emotional challenge that you will likely come out of a Schanelec film with diffuse impressions rather than any tangible insights or cognitive understanding.
The Oedipus narrative —if one can call it that as the film is nearly wordless— somewhat anchors an initiated audience (the foot wounds; the Greek theatre shoes) while likely alienating less prepared viewers, but Schanelec is not here to make it easy for her viewers. Berlinale artistic director Carlo Chatrian commented in an interview that “with Music, Schanelec takes her art of telling stories elliptically even further.” Indeed, the film can be read on an increasingly radical trajectory from The Dreamed Path (also Greece- and Berlin- set although more forgiving in its time and space jumps than Music) and her Berlinale winner I Was At Home, But…, nearly forming a trilogy of longing and sorrow.
Whether Schanelec is moving from ellipses to voids and starting to overplay her hand in excluding viewers from her world remains to be seen. Either way, I would venture that audience concerns do not keep her awake at night. Often grouped into the early Berlin School or a new new wave, Schanelec is a hermetic school unto herself.
The writer-director-editor makes one crucial change to the classic Oedipus myth that is intriguing in its impact: Jon does not find out about how the fates are playing with him, carrying on with his life in the face of terrible events, stoically bearing the (non-)agency afforded him. Again, in the absence of much of a plot or “action,” we’re feeling and guessing our way through the ending that comes, after two hours, astoundingly suddenly.
Music, with all its unflinching crypticness and usual visual Schanelec rigour, creates an odd or seductive clash—depending on where you stand on the Schanelec divide— between outbreaks of mythical passion and tentative meanderings through Angela Schanelec's mind. Sun-drenched beaches, glittering Mediterranean waters and homey interieurs somewhat mitigate the brutally static camera and trying long takes; romantic hand choreographies substitute any potential eye contact or tender declarations —outside of Tielli’s songs, which come (too) late as a sort of relief or reprieve.
Ultimately, Music is a film about family and fate, about finding the good in bad situations —a reference point that makes the film at least minimally approachable for very patient audiences and Schanelec disciples.
by Jutta Brendemühl
image: Ivan Markovic/Shellac Films
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