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An airy and experimental new drama tells the story of the Greek hero.
By Beatriz Loayza
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“Music” is a remake of the Oedipus legend, though the parallels between director Angela Schanelec’s experimental drama and the original Greek myth are, through design, elusive.
At the beginning of the film, a group of young people stop on a rugged Greek coast, including Jon (Aliocha Schneider), whose feet, like Sophocles’ hero, are flayed and bloodied. There, Jon punches one of his classmates who opposes a stone. The friend, Lucian (Theodore Vrachas), hits his head and Jon goes to prison for his crime. When he is released, he digs up a slender woman, Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), with whom he forms a family.
All of this is done with little or no dialogue. Most of the plot themes are choreographed as dark dances, gestural fragments in a loosely connected narrative that uses baroque music (and later, popular indie ballads) to sculpt their emotions.
The myth of Oedipus provides questions for making sense of these aerial processes, although it is clear that Schanelec is only interested in the contours of the story: more powerful, for example, are the flexible tactics in which the hands of two lovers touch. each other for the first time; the way a father looks at his son.
“Music” follows “I Was at Home, still. . . (2020), Schanelec’s equally mysterious riff on “Hamlet,” but there’s a difference that separates this new film not only from the previous one, but perhaps from all of Schanelec’s previous works. .
We finally find out who Jon’s parents are, but the film’s most significant revision of the original story pities Jon. He’s never told the truth, and this happy, productive ignorance permeates the radiant half of the moment in the film, set in Berlin, where Jon’s musical gifts are front and center. Hope was never something I related to Schanelec’s stern films, yet here, out of the darkness of an eternal tragedy, light emerges.
MusicNot rated. In Greek, with subtitles. Duration: 1 hour minutes. In cinemas.
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