Music | 2024
Agathe Bonitzer in Music. Courtesy of Cinema Guild.
In an interview with Mikhail Ratgauz, director Angela Schanelec said of her latest film, Music:
"The narrative develops through that which goes unsaid; it emerges because there’s no language for it. It was a matter of finding images for incidents for which, in my opinion, there are no words. As in life. One does something and remains silent about it. This is simply human. Language is an attempt to break a silence, but it’s only an attempt. Our lives are full of failed communication."
Schanelec's films are often defined by their silences. Often outright defiant of traditional "plot," much of the action occurs between what is actually said, leaving the audience to fill in the gaps as the film jumps through space and time without warning. Music is ostensibly a loose retelling of the myth of Oedipus - a baby is abandoned in the wood and adopted by a couple who raise him as their own. We rejoin him as a young man, out for a day at the beach with a group of friends. But a tragic accident lands him behind bars, where he meets a young guard, they fall in love, and when he is released, they have a baby. The older he gets, the more his eyesight fades, and music begins to play an ever greater part of his life and how he experiences the world around him.
This is not a film to be experienced as a story, however. As Schanelec herself stated, "there's no language" for what she's doing here. Music is a sensory experience for which the Oedipal myth is merely a framework. There's a deep loneliness at the heart of this film, a yearning for belonging and companionship in a world filled with tragedy, injustice, and loss. And through it all there's music...always the music.
Music is a film that is as lovely as it is obfuscating, a cinematic Rorschach blot that holds the audience at arm's length as much as it envelops us in its peculiar aural environment. It's not an easy film to settle into - its rhythms often feel disorienting and even opaque, focusing on the in-between bits of story that most other films would skip over, and skipping over the parts most other films would focus on. Schanelec understands that the truth often lies in the in-betweenness of things, and while audience mileage is going to vary wildly with such an intentionally disorienting film, but its ability to create such mesmerizing textures out of out of seemingly barebones material is both a testament to Schanelec's skill as a filmmaker and also to the power of the medium itself. It's clear that Schanelec hears the music, and in series of captivating flashes, she helps us hear it too.
