This article appeared in the July 12, 2024 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Music (Angela Schanelec, 2023)

“The hand can lie less than the face.” This was director Angela Schanelec’s response to an audience member who asked about her apparent obsession with filming hands after a screening of her new feature, Music, at last fall’s New York Film Festival. In this film, the actors’ impassive faces often resemble Greek statues in their marmoreal stillness; combined with the extreme sparsity of dialogue, these indecipherable masks serve Schanelec’s notoriously oblique and elliptical narrative style. The first time I watched Music, I couldn’t help trying to figure out what was going on and piece together the film’s echoes of the Oedipus myth, by which it was loosely inspired (per the press notes, though nothing in the movie itself tells you this). On a second viewing, I surrendered to a hypnotic reverie about hands and feet, landscapes and bodies, gazes and gestures, and people suddenly lifting their voices in song.

Speaking of feet: a classical education or a bit of quick googling will inform you that the name Oedipus means “swollen foot,” a moniker bestowed by a shepherd who finds the abandoned infant with his ankles bound. That accounts for why the protagonist of Music, a young man named Ion (Aliocha Schneider), is introduced by his bloodied and abraded feet exiting a car. Earlier, we have seen a newborn (Ion, it will become clear) rescued from a stone goat pen in the Greek mountains, cradled in the arms of an EMT, and then the baby’s adoptive mother tenderly washing his feet in the surf on a beach. It is as if fragments of Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex have drifted into Music, half-remembered images swirling like debris from a shipwreck. A cryptic scene that culminates in Ion accidentally killing a man on a dusty mountain road may be slightly less cryptic if you know not only that Oedipus unwittingly killed his father Laius in a roadside dispute, but that the curse on Laius—that he would be slain by his own son—was placed on him by Apollo as punishment after Laius raped a young man he was tutoring. It is also necessary, however, to grasp that the principal characters in Music never visibly age even as the film spans decades, making the differences between generations impossible to discern.

It is tempting to cast Schanelec herself as the Sphinx in this tale, presenting us with insoluble riddles. (She also wrote the film’s screenplay, which was awarded the Silver Bear at the 2023 Berlinale.) This would be an error. Schanelec has embedded literary works in her films before: Afternoon (2007) had echoes of Chekhov’s The Seagull, while Shakespeare’s Hamlet ran through I Was at Home, But… (2019). Yet she is not interested in retelling the story of Oedipus; there is no narrative puzzle to solve. What she seems most interested in is watching how someone makes a bed or peels a pomegranate, how prison inmates walk in wooden platform sandals, how a man gently helps a woman enter the sea from a jagged shelf of rock. Rhyming images stitch the film together: motifs of washing, adults carrying children, people getting in and out of cars.

And then there are those close-ups of hands, cupped around a scuttling crab or a squirming mouse, passing a towel or receiving money. The romantic union of Ion and Iro (Agathe Bonitzer), a guard in the prison where he serves a year for manslaughter, and whom he later marries, is expressed in one of the film’s loveliest images, of them washing their hands together under a faucet. The most frequent motif is of a hand grasping a wrist. Usually, these gestures are infused with tenderness—hands are seen comforting or caring for others—but the same image precedes the violent action that turns Ion into a murderer, underscoring the ambiguity of this encounter.

Close-ups isolating body parts alternate with extreme long shots in which the actors are ant-like figures in vast, primeval landscapes: the bleached, scrubby mountains and craggy coves of Greece. Extended static shots, say of an empty room or someone staring into space, are divided by cuts that sometimes carry us forward by years, though how much time has passed we can only guess from the aging of children, or Ion’s acquisition of black horn-rimmed glasses. Schanelec likes sudden shifts and contrasts; most startlingly, in its last half hour the film abruptly moves to the grey, concrete-and-glass streetscapes of present-day Berlin.

At this point, an entirely new set of actors appears, with Schneider’s Ion—still unaged—the only link to the earlier sections. A different kind of music enters as well. None at all is heard for the film’s first half hour; the mesmerizing sound design elevates noises of wind, waves, chirping insects, and off-screen cries and footsteps. So it feels momentous when Ion, in his prison cell, plays a mixtape Iro has made for him and a Vivaldi motet pours forth. This is the only recorded music we hear until the end credits. Instead, at moments scattered throughout the film, characters sing tricky baroque arias a capella, effortfully and imperfectly; all are expressions of mourning, loss, or longing for an absent loved one. With the move to Berlin, Ion begins performing modern songs in English (written by Doug Tielli) in an unearthly, fragile countertenor.

In the film’s denouement, an apparently random incident—the death of a man in a traffic accident—sounds an echo of earlier events, accompanied by the wails of an infant and witnesses arrayed in friezelike immobility, an image that recurs throughout the film during moments of death or violence. What is remarkable, though, is Schanelec’s ultimate rejection of tragedy. The film opens with a primal scene of horror—a man staggering down a hillside carrying an unconscious woman, howling in despair as he collapses to the ground. Ion repeats these bloodcurdling sobs a few scenes later, but in the end he seems to shrug off the fates and the furies. A feint at a violent climax gives way to a pastoral idyll by a river, with leaves rustling in the wind. A smooth traveling shot follows Ion’s small family in a dreamy procession along the bank, singing and dancing. It is an enchanting vision—provided you can hush the part of your brain that demands to know who exactly these people are and how they got there.

In a 2019 interview with Cineuropa, Schanelec said that film “gives you a chance to spend some time with images, bodies, and situations.” Should this be enough? The director’s silences and omissions, her aversion to exposition or conventional narrative structures, seem connected to a heightened concern with truth and artifice—the reason she likes hands, and animals (they are not acting), and watching people perform practical actions. In I Was at Home, But…, a woman berates a filmmaker at length for pairing actors, who are “always lying,” with real, dying hospital patients, who are “close to truth.” Yet the tension between reality and illusion is always at the heart of cinema. It sings through this strange, entrancing film, which—like music—can’t be explained, only experienced.

Imogen Sara Smith is the author of In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City and Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy. She has written for The Criterion Collection and elsewhere, and wrote the Phantom Light column for Film Comment.