It’s difficult to have an opinion on Schanelec’s new film, which is decidedly inscrutable though it retains the German slow cinema auteur’s unique sensibilities as it explores themes of fate, guilt and grief in an elusive way.
‘Exploring’ features the filmographies of filmmakers that I’ve largely completed and celebrates them on the week of their birthdays.
In Schanelec’s under-appreciated slow cinema oeuvre, this could be one of her ‘noisiest’ and most perceptive works as we become privy to the intimate conversations of several groups of strangers who are waiting to depart at the busy Paris-Orly airport.
Schanelec’s graduation feature sets her observant slow-cinema style in stone in this unconventional love triangle drama where the protagonist is torn between loving two women who are half-sisters.
Enigmatic and quiet by design, this formally-rigourous work brings Schanelec’s brand of austere cinema to its logical extreme as she once again explores human relationships in existential flux.
Schanelec skilfully captures the ebb and flow of conversations between family, friends and lovers in this slow-moving drama about a woman’s discontentment.
Schanelec’s film here works like an outdoorsy chamber piece, based on Chekhov’s “The Seagull”, and shot with the kind of abstract and fluid ambiguity that has characterised most of her fascinating output.
A German woman temporarily moves from Berlin to Marseille in this enigmatic work by a unique filmmaker largely in tune with the unfathomable ennui of her characters.
An unconventional if masterful portrait of a German family in existential crisis, executed in as challenging and philosophical a style as any that works like a contemporary tone poem.
Eternality Tan 