Music

In long takes and mostly wide shots, the camera adheres to the contrariness of the Greek landscape: the parched soil, which is miraculously able to sustain the most verdurous brushes and trees. Human life here is part of the environment that surrounds it. A baby is taken from picturesque ruins. A car of young travellers halts to show one of the passengers (Aliocha Schneider) bandaging his swollen feet. After an accident, he is imprisoned. Consorting with a warden (Agathe Bonitzer), the film’s protagonist finally learns to express himself through music.

If it weren’t for the film’s logline, the “elliptic” take on the age-old tragedy of King Oedipus, who was destined to kill his father and marry his mother, would be lost on most audiences. In fact, one could argue that filmmaker Angela Schanelec strips the tale of everything that makes it this uniquely outlasting myth: the gripping causal narrative, the philosophical quandary of prophecy, even the crowning taboo.

Instead, with Music she offers us loose tiles of a mosaic, its entirety only visible to her.

The sequences are like moving paintings, if there is dialogue, it is to set the scene, not to advance the plot. Time stands still: the sun shines as 4^th July transitions into 5^th July 2006, and the characters never age.

A scene features the narration of a football match off-screen, seemingly innocuous in the background, but the names of two Italian football players suffice to tear open a collective German wound in the audience, completely en passant. Watching the viewers flinch as they piece together that the game the characters are watching is a particularly painful one to remember, is akin to a sociological phenomenon, one that cannot be recreated as non-Germans might not catch the significance.

While self-actualisation is a valid incentive for any art form, Music would have been much better suited in the festival’s sections dedicated to experimental cinema (Forum or Encounters), rather than competing with titles, who understand that the audience is not an inconvenient side effect to this particular medium.

Selina Sondermann

Music does not have a UK release date yet.

Read more reviews from our Berlin Film Festival 2023 coverage here.

For further information about the event visit the Berlin Film Festival website here.

Watch the a clip from Music here: