The first close-up in Music is of an injured man lying on the forest floor, with blood pooled at the curve where his clavicles meet. It’s one of the many stunning images in German director Angela Schanelec’s tenth feature, especially as it breaks from the first few minutes of bird’s-eye shots of the grand landscapes — fog creeping onto the green sides of mountains, humans scaling uphill while surroundings feel frosty to a wailing woman, an ambulance slowly treading on an unpaved dirt road. It’s also an image that can only be achieved through stillness — when have we ever seen that on screen? Although some of these scenes’ purposes are easy to identity, deriving meaning for most of Music can sometimes be ambiguous and unrewarding. However subdued it may seem, Schanelec is up to the task of earning our attention.

As taglines go, Music is Schanelec’s rendition of the Greek tragedy Oedipus — less about the parallel roles or revisiting the well-known patricide/incestuous event and more about the sequential notes that fall in line with the progression of Jon (Aliocha Schneider). He is the baby that is saved from the mountainside, indicated by his laceration, first seen as a baby being washed by his adoptive mother, and later as an adult when he accidentally kills someone (not in a lightning-strike recognition, but it appears to be the same man from the beginning). He goes to a presumed jail (unclear by the stylish white-knit getup and a bizarre wooden platform-clog situation) where he meets Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), a prison guard and the amalgamation of the play’s Jocasta and the Sphinx (“Six-letter word for ‘mirror’, last letter ends with ‘o’,” she murmurs to herself before Jon offers the answer in passing: “dream”).

Linear comparisons to the Sophocles play might not be advantageous in understanding Music, which also gets its ironic kick for being nearly wordless for the first part of the film. There are a few singing interludes which provide an eerie explanation of what just occurred, and we soon find that the demure Jon likes to sing and wants to record music. Sometimes Music works at a level of inexplicable fantasy; Jon doesn’t particularly age when he reaches adulthood and he drifts through the changing environment adapting to new technology, fashion, and lifestyle, like a ghost watching the world exist as he lives through an unknown fate.

If not directly following the Sophocles play, Music is Schanelec’s thesis for a different kind of narrative language. My favorite shots are sharp and clear in color and form in what we’re seeing, even if we’re not sure what’s happening (I’m reminded a bit of the Ukrainian film The Tribe, where intended action can be deciphered to basic understanding even if the communication and culture is not as obvious to the American viewer). There is a natural symmetry to human positioning, poetry in the sunlight as it rests on someone’s face, an initial soft reception for every silent interaction. Water is as much of a main character as Jon and Iro; whether it is used for comfort, bonding, or the end, its multi-purpose function feels as spacious and unknowable when it comes on screen.

Time jumps occur without warning, but there are times where you can feel that jolt when you see Jon’s children or the sleekness of a car on a city street. The film loses its mythical appeal as we get closer to modern day, which could be part of a broader statement about the loss of magic individualism in this bustling world — but I wouldn’t get too far in that theory. Live in the scene as a privilege of seeing in this perspective (which could be toyed as a concept since Jon loses his sight enough to wear glasses for the rest of the film) and worry about whether it was enjoyable at the end.

The execution in Music‘s visuality makes it one of the most beautiful shot films in the year, even if it may not surpass the praise Schanelec’s last film, I Was Home, But. The story of Oedipus serves as a navigational excuse for these surrealistic moments to exist, down to the last scene of Jon’s “self-exile”, where he brings his children and performing group into the wilderness. Let’s see if fatalism waits for them in the middle of the road.

Music
2023
dir. Angela Schanelec
108 min.

Screens Friday, 8/16 through Sunday, 8/18 @ Brattle Theatre – click here for showtimes and ticket info