Berlinale competition film “Music” opens with gray clouds racing across the face of a Greek mountain as a storm prepares to break. It is a suitably dramatic prelude to the tumultuous events that will unfold, albeit rendered in an understated manner by German director Angela Schanelec, who won the Berlinale best director award in 2019 for “I Was at Home, But.”
As the storm lifts, an abandoned baby boy is rescued a paramedic, who names him Jon. Years later, Jon, now a young man, kills another man, accidentally, and ends up in prison. Here, he is tended to by a female guard, Iro, as his eyesight begins to deteriorate. When he is released, the two get married and have a child. But several years later, his wife discovers a terrible secret.
In the film, the myth of Oedipus is reworked freely. The action mainly takes place in Greece, starting in the 1980s,...
As the storm lifts, an abandoned baby boy is rescued a paramedic, who names him Jon. Years later, Jon, now a young man, kills another man, accidentally, and ends up in prison. Here, he is tended to by a female guard, Iro, as his eyesight begins to deteriorate. When he is released, the two get married and have a child. But several years later, his wife discovers a terrible secret.
In the film, the myth of Oedipus is reworked freely. The action mainly takes place in Greece, starting in the 1980s,...
- 2/24/2023
- by Leo Barraclough
- Variety Film + TV
, “Music” reframes the Oedipus myth as a substitution cipher, swapping words and rearranging letters in an attempt to push a familiar text toward the far thresholds of abstraction. Both enigmatic in form and uncompromising in intent, the film is, by any standard definition, a dense and challenging work. Only, for good or ill, the project feels more like a self-challenge for director Angela Schanelec — a puzzle more edifying to create than to solve, an intricately crafted ship of Theseus in a bottle inviting muted admiration for the process.
Beginning and ending with neither title cards nor overture, “Music” courts a mythic register right from the start, opening on long shots of distant mountains covered in a fog that has probably never lifted since pre-Homeric times. The title itself takes on an ironic edge, given the near silence of the film’s opening act; until the first human voice rings out at the half-hour mark,...
Beginning and ending with neither title cards nor overture, “Music” courts a mythic register right from the start, opening on long shots of distant mountains covered in a fog that has probably never lifted since pre-Homeric times. The title itself takes on an ironic edge, given the near silence of the film’s opening act; until the first human voice rings out at the half-hour mark,...
- 2/21/2023
- by Ben Croll
- Indiewire
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, the maxim goes. And writing about “Music,” the latest beautiful and strange deep-niche arthouse artifact from uncompromising formalist Angela Schanelec, feels like a similarly doomed proposition. The limitations of language are seldom as apparent as when grappling with the silvery elisions and crisp, cryptic omissions of this glancing take on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” Schanelec is unlikely to vastly expand her fanbase here, but the tiny, fervent following she has accrued over the course of now 10 fantastically intricate features may be more than ever entranced by the fertile illogic of “Music,” a postmodern expression of a premodern text.
Quite what a viewer who doesn’t go in knowing that Schanelec is interpreting Sophocles would make of this film is impossible to imagine. And it’s not like the writer-director-editor is going to make her inspiration explicit. Indeed, the Greek myth most recalled by...
Quite what a viewer who doesn’t go in knowing that Schanelec is interpreting Sophocles would make of this film is impossible to imagine. And it’s not like the writer-director-editor is going to make her inspiration explicit. Indeed, the Greek myth most recalled by...
- 2/21/2023
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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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