CINEMA
Seeing A Family Honestly
Denying the audience cinema’s traditional emotional cues
Maren Eggert (center) in Angela Schanelec’s “I Was at Home, But...,” which opens at Film at Lincoln Center on February 14.
BY STEVE ERICKSON
Sometimes puzzlement
can be a sign of innovation.
I’d be lying if I said I
fully understood German
director Angela Schanelec’s “I Was
at Home, But…” The fi lm wanders
in and out of narrative threads as
though channel-surfi ng, keeping
its emotional tone detached most of
the time but allowing Astrid (Maren
Eggert) blunt outbursts of anger.
It begins and ends outside human
life altogether, starting with a dog
chasing a rabbit and then curling
up with a friendly donkey after
having made a meal out of its prey.
The fi nal scene brings us back full
circle to the animal world.
Astrid is a middle-aged mother
whose husband has recently
passed away. Her teenage son Phillip
(Jakob Lassalle) vanished for a
week. Upon returning, he needs to
go to the hospital to have a septic
toe amputated. Astrid negotiates a
bike purchase with a man whose
vocal chords have been replaced
by an electronic talk-box. She gets
into a lengthy and passionate conversation
— which begins with
one of the fi lm’s few camera movements
— with a fi lmmaker. Another
storyline introduces a couple
who can’t decide if they want to
have children.
“I Was at Home, But…” takes
a story that could form a family
drama and drains most of the
usual markers of emotion from it.
The Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw
likened it to Michael Haneke,
but that seems like a reaction to
the German language. Unlike the
Austrian director, Schanelec is no
misanthrope. The title gestures
at Yasujiro Ozu’s comedies of everyday
life, such as “I Graduated,
But…” and “I Was Born, But…”
Schanelec, however, throws out
half the scenes that would serve
as explanatory connecting tissue.
Phillip just shows up, wearing
soiled clothes, and unless one has
already read a plot description it’s
not immediately obvious that he
has spent a week in the woods.
Schanelec has a great eye for
framing. But the blocking and
camera positions of “I Was at
Home, But…” refl ect a distance
from her characters. Attractive setups
are usually held so long that
they start to feel awkward. The
performances are even more detached,
THE CINEMA GUILD
with the exception of Eggert’s.
The characters stand rigid,
as though Schanelec directed
them to imitate statues. Robert
Bresson and the team of Jean-
Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet
have frequently been cited as an
infl uence on Schanelec’s blank direction
of actors. Just as Straub
and Huillet reinterpreted literary
texts in incongruous modern settings,
“I Was at Home, But..” puts
“Hamlet” at a distance by having
German school kids perform it in
English. Do such young children
understand its meaning? Do they
even have enough command of the
language they’re speaking to do
so?
Just when one gets used to the
fi lm’s tonal range, Astrid blows up
at her daughter because she cooked
a meal alone. Far from being affectless,
she actually expresses
an anger at her children that cinematic
mothers are rarely allowed
to acknowledge without becoming
villains. But the fi lm’s tranquilized
mood returns after that scene.
“I Was at Home, But…” uses
music — folk/ rock musician M.
Ward’s cover of David Bowie’s “Let’s
Dance” — to ground a montage that
stretches from a cheerful scene
of Astrid and her children dancing
to a shot of the sky to a trip to
an art museum. The logic behind
this is stream-of-consciousness,
if one exists. It guides the whole
fi lm, although the procession of
scenes starts to rhyme with each
other. Two scenes take up about a
quarter of “I Was at Home, But…”
Or rather, two conversations: one
where Astrid talks about returning
the bike and one in which she argues
with the fi lmmaker about his
decision to work with terminally ill
people alongside professional actors.
The stakes of the former seem
banal; the latter is quite engaging.
Schanelec gives both the same
weight.
Film at Lincoln Center preceded
the run of “I Was at Home, But…”
with a week-long retrospective of
Schanelec’s fi lms. She has lingered
behind other members of the “Berlin
School,” such as Maren Ade,
Christian Petzold, Ulrich Köhler,
and Valeska Grishebach, in American
exposure. She made her fi rst
feature 25 years ago, yet “I Was at
Home, But…” is her debut American
release.
This is a demanding fi lm, but
this says something about American
audiences and distributors’ reluctance
to engage with challenging
work. “I Was at Home, But…”
is impossible to pin down in one
sentence. It’s not remotely topical
— thank God that it won’t inspire
headlines about how it’s the fi lm
we need now. But it is incredibly
eloquent about the artifi ciality of
constructing drama and the diffi
culties of expressing emotion,
suggesting that most fi lms err on
the side of an unearned empathy.
Schanelec upends cheap certainties
in favor of ambiguities and
open-ended stories that read truer
to life.
I WAS AT HOME, BUT…| Directed
by Angela Schanelec | In German
with English subtitles | The Cinema
Guild | Opens Feb.14 | Film at Lincoln
Center, Elinor Bunin Munroe
Film Center — Howard Gilman Theater,
144 W. 65th St.; fi lmlinc.org
February 13 - February 26, 2 34 020 | GayCityNews.com
/lmlinc.org
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