Music (Angela Schanelec, 2023) (Patreon)

Before going any further, I invite you to read Phil Coldiron's Cinema Scope piece on Music, which carefully explicates both the narrative organization of the film and its somewhat ambivalent relationship to the Oedipus myth. Having watched Music knowing only that Schanelec had explicitly produced a riff on Oedipus, I was able to follow the overall movement of the film, something that cannot be as easily said for the director's previous works. It seems that, having developed her own mode of anti-narrative signification -- Bressonian framings, sudden leaps forward in time, a restrained acting mode that frequently contrasts with the extremity of the events being performed -- Schanelec chose to borrow a classical framework that would ground her extraordinary presentism, allowing us to mark our way through time, even if obliquely.

But why Oedipus? In a way, it is a foundational story that exhibits a kinship with Schanelec's odd approach to storytelling. When you look at it, the Oedipus story is frankly bizarre. Someone has a fate, one that is as unlikely as it is perverse, and his every attempt to avoid that fate simply places him back on his predetermined channel. So it is a narrative about the hopelessness if free will. But there is also a paradox in the Oedipal myth. How is it that something so singularly outlandish was chosen by Freud as the foundational narrative for Western sexuality? Like Schanelec's films, Oedipus is a machine through which the inevitability of narrative becomes twisted, kinked up, arriving at its destination despite itself.

In Music, we do not know why the infant Ion (played as an adult by Aliocha Schneider) was abandoned and taken in by an EMT (Argyris Xafis) and his wife (Marissa Triantafyllidou), or even whether he is connected to the car accident whose aftermath opens the film. By showing us the chapped, broken skin of Ion's feet, Schanelec permits us to trace this character across time, from infancy to young adulthood, and eventually the creation of his own cursed family. But this image is really Schanelec's sole concession to Sophocles, as she bends time and space, condenses major characters, and even disentangles the actual incest that lay at the heart of the story.

If these strange narrative procedures sound a bit familiar, they should. Freud's conception of the unconscious permits our dreams, or even our traumatized perceptions of waking life, to reverse or even undo linear time, swap effect for cause, and congeal various people and objects in our purview into dense, overdetermined symbols. What makes Schanelec such a singular director is her recognition that cinema is under no obligation to produce clean narratives that move in one direction, peopled with discrete, separable identities. Blake Williams is correct when he links Schanelec to the Surrealists, who saw cinema as a medium that was uniquely equipped to visualize the Dream Work, allowing our deepest impulses and confusions to be shared with others.

And so, in Music, Ion does not marry his birth mother. She never appears, and may be dead. Instead he falls in love with prison guard Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), wed her upon his release, and they have a daughter Phoebe (Frida Tarana as a six-year-old, later played by Ninel Skrzypczyk). Iro suddenly calls the parents of Lucien (Theodore Vrachas), the man Ion killed seven years ago. We never learn what possible connection Iro and Lucien may have had, but this is unimportant. She discovers that this is the man Ion went to prison for murdering, and it is this, and not Ion's criminal past, that Iro finds intolerable. 

She is Phoebe's mother, not Ion's, and Lucien is absolutely not Ion's father.  But fidelity to the particulars of the Oedipus story is not important, just as Freud's theory of the family romance does not literally require incestuous desire or castration. The myth is a template for organizing fears and drives that, by their very character, elude language. So if we needed to find a "real" explanation for Iro's horror and suicide, it would probably be a self-recognition, that her decision to overlook Ion's violent past was a kind of capitulation to toxic masculinity -- the violence that all men do, actually or unconsciously -- and that she was paid back for this complicity, when the suppressed violence actually hits home.

By the time Music arrives at its final act, Schanelec has largely abandoned the specific signifiers of Oedipus. Ion is now a singer-songwriter, and appears to have a relationship with Phoebe despite Iro's death. But then, this is the part of the film that is most explicitly about music, and if we are expected to take the film's title seriously, the awkward particulars of the conclusion require some scrutiny. If we recall the prison scenes, it is Iro who suggests to Ion that he express himself through singing. We see a list of vocal pieces she thinks he should try, and they include Vivaldi, Bach, Pergolesi, Purcell, and others. Iro is not Ion's mother, but she is his teacher, and we see the two of them teaching children in the prison (presumably the children of inmates). When Iro discovers Ion's crime, she realizes that her efforts were misguided.

But not entirely. When we see Ion performing with his fellow musicians, he is not playing classical music. Rather, he is an "experimental" singer-songwriter, transforming his own tragedies into looping, fragmented poetry. On the one hand, he is finally in control of his own narrative, and is bringing these unconscious pulsions into the realm of public language, which is the end-goal of the Freudian Dream Work. On the other hand, Ion has survived all his transgressions and now has the power to organize them as he sees fit -- something Iro will never be able to do. As Bono once said, poets "kill their inspiration then sing about their grief," and that's pretty much what we see here. The narrative is resolved, after a fashion. Music ends with music. But it lacks the interpretive freedom and formal elegance of the classical tradition. Once no one can stand in his way, Ion provides what so much of the film withholds: a story, with a protagonist front and center. The artist slays the father and stands triumphant, at least until the cycle begins again.