“My wife is crying” in the cinema: you still have to find the right feelings for these words

The tears in the title are never seen, only heard. The crane driver Thomas (Vladimir Vulević) gets a call at work from his distraught wife Carla (Agathe Bonitzer) and meets her on a bench in the park. But finding the right words for the sadness proves difficult. Later, on a walk together, Carla has to explain herself in a roundabout way with a story. How the couple once took a dance class that he only came to for her sake. And how, when he doesn’t want to continue the course, she goes alone and accidentally meets David, who also doesn’t have a partner.

The feeling of security that she felt at that moment in the arms of the unknown was something she had never experienced before. Now David is dead, died in a car accident. Thomas listens, asks questions, but doesn’t understand. His head is about to explode, he screams at one point and sits down on the floor in pain. His feelings, which he cannot articulate, have settled in his head and are expanding.

Body, spaces, language – the trinity of cinema

In her last films “I was at home, but…” and “Music,” which won the Silver Bear at the Berlinale, Schanelec gradually moved away from classic narrative cinema and turned to more abstract forms of thinking about bodies, spaces and language – the trinity of cinema.

“My Wife Is Crying” dispenses more radically than any of her films before with a conventional dramaturgy that could still be addressed with a synopsis. Instead, we watch her characters formulate feelings – “as if the meaning lay in the speech itself,” as the kindergarten teacher Carla tells the father (Ben Carter) of a child, who later turns out to be a poet and Nobel Prize candidate himself. Because in the act of speaking, consciousness arises, and the space that the words fill is the foundation for an interpersonal relationship.

Schanelec’s careful exploration of these relationships requires a lot of patience from the audience. But anyone who gets involved will be richly rewarded, because the focus on the “emotional work” in articulation reveals the processual, the fragmentary, but also astonishing side paths of mental associations.

Speech acts dissolve into comic irritations

Carla is not the only protagonist who is thinking about a relationship. Thomas’ work colleague Karen (Pauline Rebmann) says that she would be happy if her partner Valentin called the brooding Thomas his friend, “because then I would think he was thoughtful.” Esteban (Thorbjörn Björnsson), Carla’s friend, speaks of the impossibility of filling the void that his wife’s feelings would leave him after the end of their love.

Schanelec breaks down the feelings of her characters into individual speech acts, which can sometimes dissolve into comic irritations. While walking in the zoo, the conversation between Carla and her work colleague Caudia (Clara Gostynski) is suddenly drowned out by a swelling, cacophic sound: a brass band is rehearsing a march in the park, but as the rain sets in, the music soon dissolves again like a sand sculpture. And when talking about feelings comes to an end, the choreography of words in the room transitions into an improvised expressive dance on the porch to Leonard Cohen’s “Lover Lover Lover.”

The abstraction of Schanelec’s story results more from the seemingly arbitrary juxtaposition of everyday impressions and fragmentary scenes. Once Carla arrives at Thomas’ construction site on her bicycle and waves to her husband from the distance in the cockpit of his crane. The slow movement of the crane arm makes you automatically think of Thomas waving back with his work tool.

“My Wife Is Crying” is full of such ravishing details, for which the eye sharpens over the course of the 93 minutes, because Marius Panduru’s staurar settings act like an invitation to the audience to get involved in the rhythm and precision of Schanelec’s inquiries.

In “My Wife Weeps” the feeling of language also takes on a sensual and aesthetic level of abstraction, because Vladimir Vulević, Agathe Bonitzer, Thorbjörn Björnsson and Ben Carter, as non-native speakers, first seem to be looking for an emotional connection to the German words when speaking, with which they trace their feelings.

When pronounced, her sentences sound soft and extremely clear, as if the speakers first had to get hold of their meaning. The space that her words fill not only houses interpersonal relationships, but also the awareness that the feeling of loneliness is safely stored within it.