My Wife Cries

In several of her finest films, German auteur Angela Schanelec (I Was at Home, But…TIFF ’19; Music, TIFF ’23) traces the lingering effects of shock on the human spirit. It’s a phenomenon she further explores, with tremendous pathos, in My Wife Cries, an understated elegy to the pains of romantic misalignment. Pairing a precise, minimal approach to compositions and style with expressive, logorrheic monologues, Schanelec here trades modern melodrama for emotional distance and anguish in her examination of a marriage in crisis.

Thomas (Vladimir Vulević) receives a midday summons to pick up his wife Carla (Agathe Bonitzer) from the hospital.  He finds her weeping outside; she has survived a car crash in which the driver has died. As Carla attempts an aggrieved confession disguised as a plea for affection, Thomas recedes, and the pain of disloyalty shortly manifests itself physically. As the couple strives to make themselves understood — to each other and others — the confines of their love and grief become as straightforward as they do existential.

Shot on wonderfully textured 35mm by talented cinematographer Marius Panduru (who also shot Radu Jude’s Festival Official Selection The Diary of a Chambermaid), My Wife Cries is austere and solemn in tone, yet filled with surprising bursts of life, as the mix of painterly still life compositions and hypnotic tracking shots are punctuated by delightful, eccentric intrusions, such as a rehearsing orchestra in the middle of a park or a choreographed dance scene. As in all of Schanelec’s films, any study of life’s intricacies and disappointments leaves room for unexpected moments of pleasure and beauty.

ANDRÉA PICARD

Content advisory: nudity, mature themes