Montrealer Aliocha Schneider plays Jonathan, a modern Oedipus who sings more than he speaks, in Music by Angela Schanelec, a very free rereading of the famous Greek myth, presented in official competition on Tuesday at the Berlinale. To be frank, I would have had an interest in informing myself about it before the screening, in order to perhaps better understand this film, which is as contemplative as it is opaque. And I say maybe…
Filmed mainly in the Peloponnese, Music tells the tragic journey of Jonathan, abandoned shortly after his birth in the Greek mountains, then adopted by the paramedic who found him there. As an adult, while a student, he accidentally kills a young man and is sent to prison where Iro, a supervisor, becomes infatuated with him.
As in the Oedipus myth – sorry to divulge, but a few millennia, I believe, allow me – Iro is none other than his mother. And the young man he killed, his father. Which Jonathan ignores, of course.
Aliocha Schneider is at the heart of this much less clear story than it seems in the description of the synopsis. Indeed, it takes a particularly keen sense of observation to guess that he embodies this abandoned baby as an adult. This is the game to which Angela Schanelec invites us, Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2019 Berlinale for I was home, but…
The filmmaker plays with time, blurring the tracks and multiplying the ellipses. The style of the cars is vaguely modernized during the film, the ways of listening to the music too (the good old cassette recorder). There is only one match from Italy’s World Cup (in 2006) to give insiders another temporal clue. What the high-waisted jeans, which have recently come back into fashion, do not do.
Most of the characters, with the exception of Jonathan, haven’t aged a bit. The incandescent Agathe Bonitzer, revealed in the films of her father Pascal and her mother, Sophie Fillières, plays Iro. However, the actress is only 33 years old, that is to say four years older than Aliocha Schneider.
“At first, I thought Agathe was too young for the role and I didn’t dare offer it to her. But the desire to work with her took over, ”explained Angela Schanelec at a press conference on Tuesday. It is true that Agathe Bonitzer and Aliocha Schneider have a face that looks alike and gives them a vague family resemblance. But while this kind of convention – actors of the same age playing a mother and her son – is commonplace in the theater, it is rarer in the cinema.
In defense of the German filmmaker, her film does not in the slightest follow the usual narrative codes. It immediately imposes those of Greek tragedy – the stoic and placid acting of the actors is resolutely theatrical – in this succession of static shots featuring often motionless characters. Music is a film of indolent atmospheres and long silences.
Aliocha Schneider does not utter a single word during the first 30 minutes of the film and the rest of his lines can be counted on the fingers of one hand, for the next hour and a quarter. It is through music and his songs that his character of Jonathan expresses himself. The lyrical music was written for the film by Canadian composer Doug Teilli, and the songs are by Schneider himself. Aliocha, like Agathe Bonitzer, comes from a family of actors, but he is also a singer-songwriter.
The Quebecer was in a way, according to Angela Schanelec, the centerpiece of her film. She was looking for an actor who could also sing and compose music.
“Music is like another language, not just verbal. The protagonist begins to express himself through music. Like Oedipus, she allows him to live”, says the 61-year-old filmmaker, who spent a year looking for the ideal interpreter for the character of Jonathan before being sent the music for Alyosha. “Distribution is very important to me,” she adds. When I heard his music, I said to myself: it’s fantastic! I think it could work. »
She knew the musician, but not yet the actor. “I contacted Aliocha, I met him in Toronto and we decided to do the project together. He sent me songs he was working on, in addition to the ones I knew. It was clear to me that he was going to sing. »
The character of Jonathan listens to baroque music (Monteverdi, Bach, Pergolesi) that he records on Iro cassettes and sings in his cell. “I was in Montreal and I worked on the music with Doug, explains Aliocha. He composed floating melodies, with high-pitched voices. The character is also floating. »
To interpret this character damaged by life, he says, he let himself be carried away by the direction of actors of Angela Schanelec, whose cinema he had not known before (the director’s most recent film, awarded at Berlin , is the one who really revealed it in North America). “I came to Berlin and was won over by the way he worked,” says Aliocha Schneider.
A UFO in the Berlin competition, Music is an enigmatic, atmospheric, melancholy, poetic, austere, abstract and frankly demanding film. One can easily get lost in its ellipses, but it is difficult to remain indifferent to them, it seems to me. Through her unduly stretched shots, Angela Schanelec perhaps wants to evoke the suspended time of this ancient myth. Or not. Who knows…