“Music” in the Berlinale competition: Oedipus in Berlin

With a kiss, Angela Schanelec begins the tragedy of Oedipus. Lucian approaches Jon, whose body is petrified, for a few seconds their hands clench in a wordless struggle, then Jon pushes the young man away. Nature swells, insects chirping and the rush of the wind fill the air – and Lucian lies dead on the ground, his head bloodied on a rock. The montage in Schanelec’s films resembles the blink of an eye: Jon breaks down crying and has to be comforted by his friends. Already in the next scene he accepts his belongings in prison.

As in the state of rapid eye movement sleep, one has to imagine Angela Schanelec’s “Music”, a very loose adaptation of the Oedipus story. Greek mythology is a recurring theme in her films, but “Music” uses only a few motifs. Her idiosyncratic interpretation leads her via detours (and a period of about twenty years) from a bucolic Greece to present-day Berlin, where Oedipus takes his daughter Antigone to school in a cargo scooter.

A succinct voice in European auteur cinema

The ellipse has been Schanelec’s preferred narrative figure since “The Dreamlike Path” at the latest. But she has never used them as consistently as in “Music”. In this year’s competition, she formally stands out from the secured art house conventions of the competition. From the German cinema anyway. With her two most recent Berlinale films “I was at home, but…”, which won the director’s prize in 2019, and now “Music”, Schanelec has finally established itself as one of the most incisive voices in European auteur cinema.

Roughly speaking, cinema knows two forms of pretense. On the one hand, the encyclopaedic accumulation of (educational) knowledge – a suspicion that inevitably arises when reference is made to Greek drama. The Berlin filmmaker, on the other hand, chooses the opposite method, pretention through omission. There’s very little spoken word on “Music,” with songwriter Doug Tielli’s bodies and songs replacing much of the dialogue.

In this way, a second narrative level is drawn in, the logic of which you should definitely get involved with. Schanelec’s film unfolds like a riddle whose solution can be worked out; it is to be understood as an open offer. Its real magic, however, lies in trusting the story of Jon (Aliocha Schneider) and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), who takes care of the sore ankles of the “swelling foot” in prison and stays with him after the prison sentence, without any preconditions.

Angela Schanelec overwrites the mythical figures with new biographies, they are only recognizable in the motifs; yet “Music” is classic in an almost transcendent way. The prison inmates wear chunky clogs, like the actors in the Greek drama. A feeling of simultaneity connects Ivan Markovic’s pictures, they have a touching materiality. They take in the passing time as well as the pain of Jon, who unsuspectingly wanders through the upheavals of Schanelec’s production. The tragic figure is not his Oedipus alter ego, but the people around him who – like Iro – are exposed to the course of fate.

It is difficult to say by what standards one can measure “music” in this year’s Bären competition – even more: by which criteria of any competition. Over the years, Angela Schanelec has developed a film language that is incomparable in contemporary cinema, without saying goodbye to the canon of cinema. “Music” comes very close – and not primarily because of its subject – in its permeability, its pure form, to an Urtext of cinema.

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