Music

Director; Angela Schanelec (Germany, France, Greece, Serbia). Year of Release; 2023

Music has been playing for half an hour before anyone utters a full sentence. It’s not that it’s a silent film. We hear a brutal storm, background music, and a baby crying. At one stage someone calls out someone’s name. But instead of actual dialogue we see a random collection of shots which do not obviously have much to do with each other. And in none of these scenes does anyone appear to be having much fun.

We start with a baby being rescued from a stone hut and a corpse being dragged around a dusty Greek village. We then see a group of four young people driving through the same village. When the car has an accident, three of the group head towards the sea, a fourth, Jon holds back. Jon’s ankles and feet are covered in great bleeding sores, similar to those of the rescued baby we saw earlier in the film. A man approaches him and tries to kiss him with tragic consequences.

Jon is incarcerated and develops a music-based relationship with one of his warders, Iro. Later, we see Jon and Iro with a child. In perhaps the most moving scene of the film we see the foot of a woman as she approaches the top of a cliff, As she moves forward, apparently preparing to jump, our eyes are distracted by a lizard which runs across her ankle. We are moved less by the poignancy of the scene but with wonder at how the cinematographer pulled it off.

Talking of cinematography, a lot of scenes draw attention to themselves, Many scenes are shot from afar, and the camera barely moves, meaning that often activities take place off screen. The way in which the camera work always follows the same rules make us more aware of it, not less. We are painfully aware that everything is languorous – let’s not mince words, it is slow to the point of tedium.

On more than one occasion, the camera focuses on one person (a woman on a beach from long range, say, or a much closer shot of a man in a police station) and films them while they are doing very little at all. It is as if the director is daring us to look away. After a long while, the character in focus slowly gets up and walks away – into the sea, or out of the police station). Nothing else of significance happens. Then the camera moves onto the next shot.

Apparently Music is a reworking of the story of Oedipus, but if you say you got this without having to resort to background notes, you are (1) much more perceptive than me, (2) probably lying. Indeed reading some of the reviews which describe a fundamentally different film to the one that I actually saw, I’m more sure that some of the critics spend more time reading the Press Kit than they actually did in the cinema.

Of all the films I have seen before, Music is closest in tone to Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth. I’m still not sure how much I actually enjoyed Dogtooth, but – like Music – it is hardly a film which is begging to be enjoyed. Things happen. Then other – often bizarre – things happen. Much of it looks glorious, but it’s hard to decipher what any of it is supposed to mean, or indeed whether any of this important. It’s at films like this that I’m glad I never went to Film School.

At one stage, I went to the toilet (don’t you just hate It when people go to the toilet in the middle of a film?) and when I got back, the action (if “action” is quite the right word), had shifted from Greece to Berlin. The buildings were shinier, and I noticed a Zapf Umzüge removal van in the background, but the atmosphere remained as it had been. This is a film which defies manner and place. It doesn’t really have a plot as such. Things just happen until they don’t-

I’m a bit perplexed that Music won the Silver Bear for best screenplay at the Berlinale, not because this isn’t exactly the sort of film which wins prizes at the Berlinale, but because there’s not much screenplay here to see. I’m not actually sure what is being rewarded. Yes there is some great technique on display here, but this is realised more by the people using the cameras that those responsible for the writing, which is minimal and sparse at best.

I’ve seen Music called a film that you either love or hate, and what I’ve described so far would tend be towards the latter half of that equation. But I’ve got to admit that it does have something. It looks great and stays in your mind. If you’re bothered enough (and to be honest, I wasn’t really), you could be thinking about it for days. The trouble is, one of the things you might be thinking is: “did anything actually happen in that boring film I saw?”

People who like this sort of thing will love it. People who don’t, won’t. Those like me, who tend to dither on making an absolute decision on films which they think was well-crafted but ultimately soulless and insubstantial may well indulge in public hand wringing like this. I’m not sure this is the best way to respond at all. Music is a film that I really want to like, but I find myself struggling to find for convincing reasons which would justify this.