“Music” is a contemporary retelling of the Oedipus legend, though the parallels between the director Angela Schanelec’s experimental drama and the original Greek myth are elusive by design.
In the beginning of the film, a crew of young people pull up to a craggy Grecian coastline, among them Jon (Aliocha Schneider), whose feet, like Sophocles’ hero, are scraped and bloodied. While there, Jon accidentally knocks one of his companions into a rock. The friend, Lucian (Theodore Vrachas), hits his head, and Jon goes to prison for his crime. Upon his release, he reunites with a willowy woman, Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), with whom he starts a family.
All of this unfolds with little to no dialogue. The biggest plot points are choreographed like somber dances, gestural fragments in a loosely bound narrative that employs booming, baroque music (and later, modern indie ballads) to sculpt its emotions.
The Oedipus myth provides footholds with which to make sense of these ethereal proceedings, though it’s clear Schanelec is interested only in the contours of story: More powerful, for instance, are the supple ways the hands of two lovers touch for the first time; the way a father gazes beholding his child.
“Music” follows “I Was at Home, But…” (2020), Schanelec’s similarly mysterious riff on “Hamlet,” but there’s a crucial difference separating this new film from not just the previous one, but possibly all of Schanelec’s earlier work.
We eventually discover who Jon’s parents are, but the film’s most significant revision of the original story takes mercy on Jon. He is never told the truth, and this blissful, productive ignorance pervades the second, radiant half of the film, which is set in Berlin, where Jon’s musical gifts are foregrounded. Hope was never something that I associated with Schanelec’s typically dour films, yet here, from the darkness of a timeless tragedy emerges light.
Music
Not rated. In Greek, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters.