It’s nearly all the time reductive to match one filmmaker to a different, to say X is a mix of Y and Z. However let’s face it, it’s useful, particularly in luring cinephiles right into a lesser-known director’s physique of labor.
In the event you just like the affected person gaze of Chantal Akerman and her tendency towards depressed varieties, or the framing of Robert Bresson and his refusal to throw out an emotional security jacket, then director Angela Schanelec is for you. She’s on her tenth characteristic now with “My Spouse Cries,” her newest movie to play within the Berlin competitors after she received the Silver Bear for Greatest Director for “I Was at Residence, However” in 2019, and the Silver Bear for Greatest Screenplay for “Music” in 2023.
Her newest movie facilities on the disconnect between a blue-collar husband and his spouse after an accident. “My Spouse Cries” (“Meine Frau Weint” in German) premieres on Tuesday night time in Berlinand forward of the premiere, IndieWire debuts the unique trailer (which is a beautiful, completely edited, and tantalizingly off-kilter one) within the video above.
Right here’s extra on the movie instantly from the Berlinale’s program: “An extraordinary workday on a constructing web site. Forty-year-old crane operator Thomas receives a name from his spouse, Carla: he has to choose her up from the hospital. As soon as there, he finds her crying and discovers that she has had a automotive crash. Carla tells him about her dance accomplice David, with whom she was going to view a home within the nation and who has died within the accident. She tries to inform her husband the whole lot overtly and truthfully, however Thomas more and more withdraws into himself. They merely don’t perceive one another. A movie in regards to the problem that’s life and in regards to the seek for a standard language.”
Schanelec’s movies are usually reserved of their emotion — however should not with out feeling regardless of ambiguous, even scientific framing. A minimum of recently, these movies contain an inner household or relationship battle that releases from the crevices of repressed emotion after an surprising occasion throws routine out of order. Her breakout got here in 1998 with “Locations in Cities,” a coming-of-age story a couple of Berlin teenager who turns into pregnant throughout a category journey to Paris.
Movie at Lincoln Heart ran a retrospective of Schanelec’s movies in 2020 (simply earlier than COVID), writing that her movies “unearth the metaphysics rumbling beneath the placid floor of on a regular basis life.”