Absence and presence. At one point during Angela Schanelec’s I Was At Home, But..., a woman wanders around an art gallery on her own. Several other people walk wordlessly about the space alongside her but they all seem to be strangers to one other, linked only by this shared search for a vantage point from which to study each painting. Schanelec, in the typically ascetic, almost Bresson-ian visual style she has cultivated over a twenty-five year career, has these characters stand rigidly in a static frame, with focus on the foreground and space filled sparingly by out-of-focus silhouettes in the back. The emotion evoked by this simple composition, of several people peripherally existing in the same space, is one that echoes throughout Schanelec’s cinema. A keenly felt disconnection from the world as it exists; one of the works on display is a Canaletto landscape of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, filled with people but viewed from the opposite side of the Grand Canal.
I Was At Home, But… begins with a brief sequence of a fox hunting and subsequently eating a hare, before switching to a young boy, Thomas, returning to his school following an unexplained disappearance. Astrid, the boy’s mother, rushes to the school to retrieve him, and the two return home to the boy’s younger sister. Thomas’s disappearance is never discussed, and the family return to a routine. Astrid buys a faulty bicycle on eBay and argumentatively attempts to arrange a refund; Thomas stars in a class production of Hamlet. Life goes on. But Schanelec imbues each scene with an ineffable tension, often punctuating the placidity of her (mostly) static images and immaculately naturalistic sound design with awkward conversations and violent outbursts. There’s a strain on Astrid’s relationship with her children, and they seem to rely on each other more than they do on her.
It has become common practice in contemporary cinema for filmmakers to deliberately obfuscate narrative information by employing fragmentary structures as a way to make mundane ideas feel interesting, so it’s refreshing to see such a device instead used as a tool for insight. Schanelec, particularly in her later films, strips out anything that could be perceived as superfluous to instead focus on moments that serve to enrich what could easily be inferred. One scene here shows Astrid climbing a moss-covered wall in the dead of night to lay alongside a gravestone. Schanelec shows the birth date written on the stone, one that seems to roughly match Astrid’s, but nothing else, while, in the film’s only use of music, an eerie acoustic cover of David Bowie’s Let’s Dance plays. The music continues as the scene cuts to the foot of a bed, with a nurse sat forlornly in the background, as Astrid and her two children perform a choreographed dance routine to the same song for an unseen person. All of this information, specifically viewed in this order, suggests the root of the film’s emotional turmoil without explicitly confronting it. I Was At Home, But… is, in this sense, an algebraic film, one in which the gaps and tangents are integral to the whole yet remain unresolved, acting as letters among the numbers to give the impression of a complete equation. The reality, however, is that this family has been cast adrift by tragedy, both from each other and the world around them. The numbers don’t add up in the same way that they used to. What was once natural is now strained and fragmented, but these divisions are not unresolvable. In the film’s most harrowing scene, Astrid repeatedly loses her temper with her children, yet they keep coming back to comfort her even as she pushes them away. Schanelec makes it clear that, however far from each other they might be in this moment, nothing has been lost for good.
Joanna Hogg’s semi-autobiographical drama The Souvenir, similarly features a summarising sequence in a gallery. Julie, a young film student in 1980s London, is led through The Wallace Collection by Anthony, a mysterious man she’s just started dating who works for the foreign office. Eventually, they arrive at a painting by Jean-Honore Fragonard, the film’s namesake, in which a young woman is shown carving the initials of her lover into the trunk of a tree. The two lovers look at the painting for a while, before leaving the gallery together to return to her flat. This painting and the perspectives from which it is viewed create an interesting parallel to Hogg’s film. On one hand, there’s Anthony. A man who reveres this painting, and specifically takes Julie to see it. Anthony is later revealed to be a heroin addict, and seems to long for the stability of a relationship, with the love and devotion and care that comes with that. On the other hand, there’s Julie. A young woman, fully aware of her own privileged background, who wants to remove herself from the bubble of the world she knows and experience life. She has plans to make a film set amongst Sunderland’s shipyards, a world away from her life in London, but Hogg rarely shows her out of her plush two-storey flat in Knightsbridge. In a brief scene, a bomb explodes at the nearby Harrods department store, so close to shake her flat. She rushes to the window to observe the scene, before returning to her routine, seemingly oblivious to the political turbulence unfolding in real time on her doorstep. This painting must feel very different to her than it does to Anthony. An idealistic image of romance in which time apart can be whiled away by carving love notes into trees, so caught in the throes of a love affair that nothing else has much importance. A chance encounter at a party puts Julie in the orbit of Anthony, a love affair blossoms very quickly, and then, perhaps inevitably, cracks begin to emerge.
Joanna Hogg has, in each of her previous three films, proven remarkably adept at creating scenarios in which resentments emerge between people so gradually as to be invisible. In Unrelated, her first film, a middle-aged woman goes to Tuscany with the family of an old friend, only to drift towards the boozy, stoney antics of her friend’s teenage son and insert herself into the middle of several messily awkward family divisions. In Archipelago, a turbulent family crisis is played out in isolation on the Isles of Scilly, while in Exhibition, two artists scrutinise their lives together when they go through the motions of selling the home they’ve shared for close to twenty years. Anxiety and isolation are the dominant forces of these films yet, in each, people ultimately return to each other, if only for a moment. The Souvenir is no different. This fledgling relationship quickly becomes toxic when the destructive nature of Anthony’s addiction emerges, at first briefly through his biting critique of her ideas about cinema and occasional requests to borrow money, and then, following a clearly staged robbery at Julie’s flat, disastrously. But she never abandons him, even as he gives less and less and takes more and more from her. She misses classes, and her film work is marginalised until it’s forgotten entirely. She spends nights awake waiting in vain for him to come home, and even on occasion goes with him to buy heroin to make sure nothing (else) happens to him. Hogg favours static tableaus during Julie’s interactions with Anthony and typically shoots the entirety of a conversation from one vantage point, lending the film a patient, analytical distance from which to observe how dependable these two people have become on one another, yet she never sacrifices any of the situation’s inherently dramatic emotions. The Souvenir is a wrenching film about feeling trapped, unable to extract oneself from an endless and unsatisfying present, but Hogg, much like Schanelec, never loses sight of a possible future for Julie. Robbed of time, she is no longer willing to wait for the world to come to her, and even as she struggles to see the forest for the trees, the sun starts to rise on the next chapter of her life.