"Don't think too much," the director advises before the public screening of her film THE DREAMED PATH at TIFF16. And if you know Angela Schanelec, you know she is not joking but honestly trying to give the audience a way in. Otherwise though,
Schanelec takes no prisoners, explains nothing. True to her Berlin School roots, she is a defiantly consistent filmmaker, and that’s a blessing for arthouse fans.
Perhaps the most politically situated work of hers to date, the film begins with Greece as a new EU member (we know how that story continues) and moves on to the fall of the wall, with the huge inner-European refugee movement that mirrors Europe in 2015. For the characters in the film, 1989 happens on the TV screen, before
they all find themselves in today’s reunited Berlin.
Change of place is not explained but to be inferred from packing a suitcase or a letter arriving or simply different architectural styles (knowing the intricacies of your Euro designs helps in decoding these hints faster but in the end is no crucial help in sense-making).
The first scenes are touching enough, with a young couple delivering one of the sweetest renderings of The Lion Sleeps Tonight I have ever heard, set in
exquisitely impressionist pictures with lush colours that flow through the film (the orange! the green! the blue!).
Then news of a mother's grave illness is received, shown through two sets of male feet and their reactions in just one of the many Bressonian moments.
The frequent shots of hands and feet are much more important and revealing than the faces of the mostly non-actors caught in a highly artificial and cryptic but oddly believable, shell-shocked, slow-mo stasis. The characters are taciturn and non-reactive down to the last supporting role, the men noticeably less relatable, less fit for life.
There is hardly any dialogue, often non-sequiturs; more declarations than exchanges, and next to no eye contact. The most chatty scenes are between a son --despite his one-word answers-- and his blind father, who cannot gather information any other way and who at some point says "I can see people," (and is perhaps the only one who does, other than the dog). A three-minute break on a bench smartly opens up the entire father-son relationship while talking about stale chocolate.
None of this makes for passionate love stories --love is there but not expressed (which gets harder to watch when it comes to the children in the story)-- and still the
director's stringent visual mastery and montage weaves a safety net of melancholia. The switch between the two distinct storylines of two couples' separation that structure the film, if one can call them that, is one such example of a brilliant baton change.
The closing shot is perfect, with no change in sight but neither defeatist nor depressing.
The film invokes several other genres. It is a kind of photo book of vignettes, like the one the young woman leaves through on screen.
The characters pause or pose like in a daguerreotype. We watch two people closing and opening blinds -- inertia yes, but never boredom.
It is a modern dance choreography, an impression that Schanelec confirms in the Toronto Q&A, with one of the actors being a dancer and her statement that she likes to tell film through bodies.
If you feel the need to "understand” films let alone a filmmaker's intentions, do not apply to the school of Schanelec. If you can let go, you are rewarded with deeply human explorations — of helplessness, homelessness, survival, and of people who can't live the lives they have. As much as she would ever comment she did in Toronto. Asked whether she knows what happens in the film's ellipses she said "No, but I have fantasies about it." and "It's impossible to work for five years and then explain a film in two minutes.
I don't think about message, I think about keeping tension and rhythm." Filmmaking as a dreamed path.
Schanelec is the fourth wall and not surprisingly reminded the audience that "This is not reality, this is a film."
Years later I have not forgotten the Schanelec films I have seen and I have a feeling I will not forget this one either. She is one of the few directors I gladly let get away with leaving me in the semi-dark.
Wavelength head programmer Andrea Picard summed it up perfectly when praising Schanelec's "compositional rigour ", saying "It may seem cold, but the accumulative effect is devastating."
by
@JuttaBrendemuhl
promo still: courtesy Film Festival Locarno photo Reinhold Vorschneider
