Music

Leading contemporary German filmmaker Angela Schanelec (I Was at Home, But…) is singularly adept at creating dramas of unexpected catharsis via the most oblique narrative strategies. Her latest film, MUSIC, pushes this approach to new levels of emotionality. Using abstract gestures and broad narrative ellipses, yet still managing to plumb the depths of its characters’ complicated traumas, MUSIC tells the story of a young man and woman unknowingly united by the same violent death. Brought together by fate and horrible irony, Ion (Schneider) and Iro (Bonitzer) first meet in prison, where he’s an inmate and she’s a guard; they kindle a romance fomented by passion for classical music and opera, followed by marriage and children. Yet as in all tragedies, the past returns to haunt them. Inspired by the Oedipus myth, Schanelec has created an alternately austere and vivid portrait of grief and redemption through art told with her distinctive compositional rigor. – notes from Film at Lincoln Center