Fragments originally written for Music/Last Summer review for Taipei Mansions.
One of the great paradoxes of any artform, even one as young as film, is both the necessity and the impossibility of comparing any given work with another. A fundamental trait of truly great art is its endless mutability for both the artist and the viewer—inextricably bound up from the unique mindsets the former was in during the process of creation, and received differently every time by even a single individual in the latter category—and yet a work cannot be viewed completely within a vacuum, as it exists along a vast continuum of influences and descendants. The natural next step (perhaps after ranking and listmaking) is to initiate such conversations
It can be a foolhardy venture to bring films into conversation, for fear of risking oversimplification or even more reductive shorthand. But the release of Angela Schanelec's Music and Catherine Breillat's Last Summer, which premiered in 2023 at the Berlin and Cannes Film Festivals respectively, on the same day in the United States offers an opportunity to examine the latest works from two of the female European filmmakers who, for lack of a better word, have been dubbed "singular" as much as nearly anybody.
Despite their relatively comparable career lengths—Breillat made her debut with A Real Young Girl in 1976 but there was a nine-year gap between that film's follow-up and 36 Fillette (1988); Schanelec's directorial debut I Stayed in Berlin All Summer was a mere six years after that—it is notable that there has been no overlap whatsoever in their international appreciation. Breillat worked steadily since her landmark 36 Fillette, garnering varying degrees of controversy and acclaim, until Abuse of Weakness (2013) kicked off a ten-year break from directing, while Schanelec's breakthrough didn't come until The Dreamed Path (2016), one of the unlikeliest and most alienating films to put its director on the map stateside in recent memory.
The 62-year-old German and 75-year-old Frenchwoman may be taken to represent two distinct strands of filmmaking that are nevertheless highly prized by a certain subset of the festival landscape. For the former, it is a cinema of absolute rigor, foregoing concrete plot beats in favor of seeking the most minimal, even severe means to embody a more abstract series of experiences. The latter continues to resist complete categorization, but it rests somewhere in between provocation and familiarity, a prickly balance between the extremity of her scenarios and the skillful, malleable nature of her form. To this end, it's a remarkable coincidence that both filmmakers made works that interface with, to one degree or another, the case of Oedipus: Music operates as a very loose rendering of that myth before following its own path, while Last Summer—a remake of the Danish film Queen of Hearts (2019), for which Breillat was commissioned by Saïd Ben Saïd, the French film producer whose name has been on a number of the most important films of the past twenty years—deals with the relationship between a Parisian lawyer and her 17-year-old stepson.
The more obvious comparison for the latter is probably Todd Haynes's equally masterful May December, another immensely knotty film about an age-gap relationship that premiered at last year's Cannes, but such contrasting approaches offered by this quirk of distribution and programming come to symbolize what may be considered separately as the
