Thirty or so minutes into Angela Schanelec’s Music, a character makes a startling discovery. We’re inside a prison on the outskirts of an unidentified Greek town, where Jon (Aliocha Schneider) is to spend a manslaughter sentence. And we’re watching him bathed in the cell’s cold light when he suddenly opens his mouth and starts to sing. It’s a moment that shatters the film, one of the loudest in a tale otherwise marked by wistful silences. Jon’s stuck a grocery list of classical composers to the wall, and he intones an aria from Vivaldi’s Il Giustino, “Vedrò con mio diletto.” It’s the first time we hear him sing and it amounts to an otherworldly revelation, both for the young man crooning and those of us who listen: a human being waking up to a superpower.
There’s a tendency to write off Schanelec’s cinema in medical terms.
There’s a tendency to write off Schanelec’s cinema in medical terms.
- 3/6/2023
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
Writer, director and editor Angela Schanelec began making movies in the early nineties, building up a respectable body of work as one of the key members of the Berlin School of art house auteurs based out of Germany’s capital. But it wasn’t until her last feature, I Was at Home, But…, that the 61-year-old filmmaker finally received recognition in the U.S., including a full retrospective at Lincoln Center that took place in 2020.
Home was a difficult through rewarding watch, enigmatically telling the story of a family getting past the premature death of a father. Schanelec’s latest film, Music, may prove even more puzzling for audiences, although it’s filled with some of the director’s signature flourishes: beautifully composed long shots; an elliptical narrative that jumps ahead in time without warning; quietly contained performances that focus more on gesture than dialogue; and a surgically precise use of sound and music.
Home was a difficult through rewarding watch, enigmatically telling the story of a family getting past the premature death of a father. Schanelec’s latest film, Music, may prove even more puzzling for audiences, although it’s filled with some of the director’s signature flourishes: beautifully composed long shots; an elliptical narrative that jumps ahead in time without warning; quietly contained performances that focus more on gesture than dialogue; and a surgically precise use of sound and music.
- 2/21/2023
- by Jordan Mintzer
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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