Following a trailer for our most-anticipated Berlinale premiere, Christian Petzold’s Afire, another title we’re greatly looking forward to is Angela Schanelec’s Music. With I Was at Home, But and The Dreamed Path, the German director has carved out an enigmatic body of work full of moments of surprising resonance. Starring Aliocha Schneider, Agathe Bonitzer, Marisha Triantafyllidou, Argyris Xafis, and Frida Tarana, the trailer for her latest film has now arrived.
The director tells Variety, “There are questions in my life, and thus also in my films, to which I have no answers. They relate to family and family relationships as well as to fate, or mere chance, that determines us and to which we must bow. The myth of Oedipus encompasses all of this, including the pain of it all.”
“The myth of Oedipus is the core of this masterful piece of elliptical storytelling in which every detail, no matter how small, becomes a sign – or not,” reads the official Berlinale synopsis, “This is a film that transports us from the mountains and beaches of Greece to the lakes of Berlin, and from sometime in the 1980s to the present day. In between, there is one date that can be ascertained: 2006 (featuring football and two decisive minutes for Italy). A newborn baby boy is rescued from a storm one night. Paramedic Elias and his wife take him in, name him Jon, and raise him. As a young man, Jon is attacked and commits manslaughter. The victim is none other than … During his incarceration, Jon and a female prison officer named Iro become a couple. The tape recorder is playing baroque music: the playlist includes Monteverdi, Bach, Pergolesi. The aesthetics of this music develop into the film’s informing principle, reflecting events in a lucidly enigmatic and concretely abstract way that revels in its own austerity. In Angela Schanelec’s baroque-postmodern cinema, formulas from the doctrines of the affections and figures apply. An addictive intellectual-sensual challenge that allows us to blindly see.”
See the trailer below.
