Angela Schanelec’s contemplation on love is even more opaque and abstract than usual in her latest, My Wife Cries. As usual, there will be people having difficulties in communicating their feelings, with their frustrations in full display on their sad faces. There will be overwhelming tender moments shared among them. And there will be visual cues so abstract and unknowable, they will remain mysteries until repeated viewing. There will be imbued silences and heart pouring, long monologues. And these are all the reasons why I eagerly await every new Schanelec film's release with anticipation. And she does not disappoint.
Thomas (Vladimir Vulevic), a lanky crane operator in a construction company, gets a distressing call from his young wife, Carla (Agathe Bonitzer, seen in Schanelec's Music). He later finds her crying in the woods, inconsolable. She asks why he stopped going to the dance classes with her. Why does he not find interest in her wants and desires? He finds out that her dance partner in a dance class she has been attending, has died in a car crash while she was with him. She confesses that she planned to run away with the man. Unlike Thomas, he understood her and had shown an interest in her desires and needs. Upon hearing this, which is too much to take for him, Thomas has a cardiac distress episode and gets hospitalized.
So goes My Wife Cries, perhaps Schanelec's most impenetrable and abstract film to date. But I say this every time after watching her new output. The film revolves around the couple and their immediate workfriends. There will be a Band of Outsiders style, out of nowhere choreographed dance scene, there will be color coded wordrobes, there will be odd characters with sad faces popping up. And there will be long continuous monologues. And just like her other films, there will be people trying desperately to connect with each other and failing. There will be wondrous and contemplative moments in nature, contrasting with traffic, industrial machine noises and a brass band's loud music in the street that drowns out the dialog.
Nothing is stated too obviously. The female characters, with their short hair and androgynous look, seem out of place against the harsh industrial landscapes. The lush greenery of Berlin as Thomas and Carla spend walking and talking, has a fairy tale, otherworldly quality to it, rather than a bustling city of 4 million. Schanelec's minimalist approach - lack of background music, camera movements and empty spaces as the characters stay still, staring off the frame, the film creates its own reality, far removed from our everyday lives, populated by sad, lonely people desperately trying to connect and understand each other.
My Wife Cries is another somber yet hypnotic puzzle piece about our yearning for human connections and our utter inability to understand one another. I can't wait to watch it again, to see if there's any other clues and bits I missed the first time to understand more and soak up all the human warmth and melancholy of Schanelec's lonely, yet lovely world.
