Cinema Travelogue

At the beginning of German director Angela Schanelec’s 11th feature, My Wife Cries, a construction worker, Thomas, enters the frame and conveniently sits down on a chair at its centre; he is waiting for his crane to be fixed. When he begins conversing with two female offscreen voices, the composition appears rather opaque: there is him, the chair, a cut-off corner of a photo frame in the top-right, blocks of wobbly shadows at the bottom of the frame, and the stark white wall behind him. This design immediately returns us to Schanelec’s world of theatrical austerity – dead spaces and dead times brought to the forefront. One of the office workers informs Thomas that his wife has called about an unknown emergency, but the discussion extends far beyond that, from purchasing a new couch to relationship codependency to the fear of one’s child leaving them.

For viewers unfamiliar with Schanelec’s work, a few questions stand out: why does it fixate on an ostensibly barren frame for so long? Why is everyone speaking in such an unnatural manner? And why does this scene last much longer after the key information (the wife is trying to find her husband at work) has been delivered? The answer, which leads to understandably alienating results, stems from one of Schanelec’s quotes: “It is actually not possible to imagine a person without a room around it,” a motto she’s kept close to her work for more than 30 years.

In the opening scene, the space around the characters is precisely defined: the construction worker is turned to his left while speaking, indicating that the two women are situated just beyond the right edge of the frame; and later, when static mediums reveal them sitting at their own desks, we understand how the room is structured without an overarching master shot. The two women are kept to their singles and never appear in the same frame, so despite our understanding of their relative spatial relations, they remain divided. Two close-ups of hands washing items in a sink intersperse the static medium and break the visual patterns established throughout the scene because of the lack of spatial definition. The division and isolation of spaces within a banal office space reflect the central concern of My Wife Cries: being suspended in a state of stasis in life. How is this presented? Characters and their long monologues, heightened by the actors’ strained Bressonian mannerisms, repeatedly echo stories from unknown pasts and fears about equally uncertain futures: vignettes of married lives, bodies yearning to be with one another, and the cosmic tragedy of their emotional estrangement and misalignment.

My Wife Cries, like most of Schanelec’s films, explores fractures within relationships that resist definition in words. Thomas and Carla, the former a construction worker and the latter a librarian who recently quit to return to kindergarten teaching, are the central couple. The fracture within their relationship is addressed across two continuous tracking shots following the two arguing while walking their bikes, one at night, the other in the morning, divided by an abrupt episode where the argument between the two becomes so intense that Thomas develops an intense headache and has to be taken away by ambulance. Carla dramatically recounts how she fell for a student, David, at a dance class after feeling Thomas’s negligence in dancing with her, and Thomas loudly and confusingly rebuts those feelings, which were completely unknown to him. At the end of the story, it is revealed that Thomas received the call at the beginning of the film because Carla was in a car crash with David when the two tried running away together, and the latter died on site.

Schanelec takes structural gambits here. The titular event, the wife crying, occurs close to the beginning of the film. It resembles the scene at the end of Eric Rohmer’s Love in the Afternoon, where an intense flow of irrational emotions – with reasons ambiguous to the viewers – occurs under the brightest of daylights. But here, the crying happens on a bench shrouded by the park’s lush green canopies. The mystery of the tension between the couple crystallizes quickly when the entire process of the fatally failure at infidelity is revealed. During Carla’s confessions, an intensity develops that mirrors David’s headache as it feels like an entire world of passion and turbulence, exclusive to a world offscreen, is erupting all of a sudden. But afterwards, after everything has been said, feelings turns cold again and there are still more than two-thirds of the movie to go. A vacant feeling emerges and we begin to question, “what’s next?”

Schanelec has played the game of information withholding before, especially in the third chapter of Marseille, where scenes leading up to Sophie being detained by the police are skipped over and only revealed through her own recollection during police interrogation, but she seems to be doing the opposite here – unleashing all the plot to us and turning the rest of the film into uncharted territory. She seems to be asking: how can a narrative even progress forward when the most dramatic events have already occurred?

The structure thus mirrors the unknowability of what remains in the couple’s lives. We somehow arrive at the same spot emotionally as the characters – where do we go now after the waves of passion have died down due to mysterious fate? Schanelec (obviously) doesn’t and can’t give a direct answer. Character psychology is extraneous to her, and the rest of the film directly negates narrative progression. What occurs seems to happen linearly, but I think viewers are more likely to remember it as singular moments or gestures arbitrarily spread across time than as sequentially related events.

Deemphasis and mystification become central to Schanelec’s formal project, and the subject matter of marital plight nicely positions the film between her earlier familial drama, like Passing Summer, and her more abstract and recent Music, a much more radical play on places and gestures. In My Wife Cries, characters recount intimate personal experiences, while the group or single person beside them listens with expressionless faces. Austerity and spontaneity, two disparate elements that would otherwise incite polar-opposite responses, magically mould together because these intensely personal words and robotic recitation of poetic sentiment are not reciprocated by the receiving end of the voice. The sentiments, or the reactions to them, matter less in the film’s grand scheme than how they are positioned together in a frame or sequence. The answer to Carla’s long monologue about her near-death experience in David’s car to the father of one of her students is the reveal that the father is a renowned poet, and a shot of him walking away with his child in the distance, wordless and intimately beautiful thanks to the quality of the light and movements, leaving Carla’s recounted experiences in a void but opening up a brand new space and possibility of character. The result is an ecstatic drift of unpredictability, carried by unexpected encounters in life.

The film’s compositions repeatedly deemphasize human bodies. Schanelec’s approach is not as uniform as Cyril Schaublin’s Unrest, but in many compositions it is easy to get the feeling that a character is a minuscule entity in the context of their surroundings – a larger canvas. The duration of Schanelec’s takes, in this case, lets our eyes take in everything in the frame and notice a minute detail in a composition that was just the focus of the previous one. The film takes many departures and detours, but we ultimately arrive at a familiar texture; similarly, in the same composition, groups of people – bands in a park, a group of construction workers in a breakroom – assemble and disassemble within the same composition, transforming the frame into an organism where people are entities manoeuvring around an invisible nucleus.

Familiarity and estrangement, like flowers that can transform into abstract blocks of colours through a window frame, ultimately obscure our identification with onscreen events. At the end, Schanelec takes another gambit by plunging us into an unfamiliar time and space, but with characters we have seen throughout the film. We have no idea where we are, a feeling as if we have just woken up from a deep nap of unknown length, but we move forward in the film like the characters do in their lives. It is only because the frames capture a kind of intimacy with this world that we know so deeply. All in all, Schanelec makes the world feel alien but, in the end, reminds us of its primordial beauty.