Music review – shapeshifting puzzle is an enigmatic mind bender

Angela Schanelec is a film-maker whose cool and mysterious refusal to render up meaning in the conventional sense has defeated me in the past, and her new movie is equally as opaque and enigmatic: an array of puzzle pieces whose shape shifts even as the audience wonders how or if they should be fitted together. It is a film that does not proceed in the narrative style and the title seems to suggest that we should think of it as a different art form entirely: a constellation of themes, ideas, tropes, moods in which the personae relate to each other as concepts rather than characters.

While unable honestly to claim to have understood it, I have to concede the movie’s artistry, its conviction, even its brilliance. Schanelec is in command of a film-making language which compels attention, although there is something strenuous in the way the film appears to be showing us the key to some locked cabinet of significance but won’t quite let us use it.

Music proceeds in a series of stark and startling tableaux, beginning on a hot, dusty Greek island and ending on the cloudy streets of Berlin, often shot from fixed camera positions, showing people confronting each other in a state of unsmiling wordlessness. Violence and self-harm are recurring ideas, along with the vulnerability of children. A figure is seen carrying what is possibly a corpse. A baby is rescued from rubble. A car with teens almost crashes. New characters are introduced. We seem at one stage to be in prison.

Finally a young woman throws herself from a rocky ledge, just as a lizard is nuzzling her ankle: a poignant touch. When the scene moves to Germany, this woman’s partner is revealed to be a musician, recording a plaintive song – and in fact his face, while singing, comes the closest anyone here gets to smiling. Music is the film’s dominant theme: characters sing to themselves, as if in a dream or a trance.

Music is a challenge; it is complex and demanding. This is not some streaming-TV-type content to be consumed. Some will find it rewarding and some won’t; I myself am unsure. But as an event and a spur to thought it is to be welcomed.