‘Music’ Review: Angela Schanelec’s Radically Mystifying But Rewarding Riff on ‘Oedipus Rex’
variety.comJessica Kiang Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, the maxim goes. And writing about “Music,” the latest beautiful and strange deep-niche arthouse artifact from uncompromising formalist Angela Schanelec, feels like a similarly doomed proposition.
The limitations of language are seldom as apparent as when grappling with the silvery elisions and crisp, cryptic omissions of this glancing take on Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex.” Schanelec is unlikely to vastly expand her fanbase here, but the tiny, fervent following she has accrued over the course of now 10 fantastically intricate features may be more than ever entranced by the fertile illogic of “Music,” a postmodern expression of a premodern text.
Quite what a viewer who doesn’t go in knowing that Schanelec is interpreting Sophocles would make of this film is impossible to imagine.
And it’s not like the writer-director-editor is going to make her inspiration explicit. Indeed, the Greek myth most recalled by the opening is not that of Oedipus but Sisyphus.
Read more on variety.com