My Wife Cries

German auteur Angela Schanelec is a staple at the Berlin film festival – for better or worse.

The first shot of My Wife Cries is of a white wall in an office space. Someone pins a schedule onto it; a little later, a man (Vladimir Vulević) appears in frame, sits down on a chair, and asks to wait here. As he makes awkward conversation with two women working in this room, the audience learns that his wife has tried calling him. When the couple finally reunites, the woman (Agathe Bonitzer) appears distraught.

As usual, Schanelec strips her dialogue of all emotion. One is tempted to use the word monotonous in trying to describe the particular way the actors deliver their lines, but this isn’t necessarily the case. The majority of them are evidently not native speakers of the German language, causing their cascade of phrases to take on unlikely speech melodies and cadences. There is a hyperfixation on the use of the subjunctive mood, which is far removed from the vernacular. The timing of the words is another factor that appears to counter our expectations of realism being depicted in film. When the wife first starts narrating the events that led to her titular tears, the conversation is interrupted by her husband’s reaction (“My head bursts!”). The next day, the conversation picks up right where they had left off the day before, without segue.

Deprived of textual stimulation, the audience begins scanning the composed image for anything to grasp, and almost joyfully seizes on the smallest detail: in the long take of two actors lying on a bed, their breathing is not in sync, their stomachs lifting and lowering against each other’s rhythm.

There are two interruptions of this stiff impassibility. First, the scene in which the wife cries (a fact informed by her posture and an audio layer of subdued whimpers, as the camera is too far away from its actors to pick up on any potential display of emotion on her face). The second, and the uncontested highlight of the film, is a character dance set to Leonard Cohen’s Lover Lover Lover.

In its dismissal of considering the audience experience, My Wife Cries makes a case for the horseshoe theory applied to cinema. We are justifiably critical of the persistent spoon-feeding of information in many made-for-streaming films (cue “second screen viewing”), but the total absence of guidance can be just as detrimental. When a film so defiantly withholds everything, it practically sends watchers reaching for their phones out of reflex, in a desperate attempt to fill the void. While the medium of film can – and should – challenge its viewers, it risks overreach when even a 90-minute piece turns into an utter endurance trial.