Dis­cov­er the movie rid­dles of Angela Schanelec

Film­mak­ing is often a case of fol­low­ing an impulse. It’s a process that can bring you towards mil­lions of ador­ing eye­balls, or it can lead you to few­er more crit­i­cal but dis­cern­ing ones. The films of the Ger­man direc­tor Angela Schan­elec place this conun­drum into sharp focus. They coquet­tish­ly court con­ven­tion, to then sud­den­ly stride off piste.

It may read like a diss to say that Schan­elec is not some­one who appears wor­ried by the prospect of comb­ing through week­end box office receipts, but it very much isn’t. She is some­one who works with the longview in mind, mak­ing films which proud­ly sit out­side the main­stream, but are also about sub­jects which man­age to tran­scend the cul­tur­al moment.

MUBI is cur­rent­ly host­ing a ret­ro­spec­tive of her work, offer­ing a rare chance to catch a small set of movies which sad­ly bypassed tra­di­tion­al dis­tri­b­u­tion routes in the UK. The occa­sion is the pre­mière of her newest work, The Dreamed Path, which was met by bemuse­ment, intrigue and no small amount of ado­ra­tion when it pre­miered at the 2016 Locarno Film Fes­ti­val. Those report­ing on the film seemed ill equipped to pass a knee-jerk adju­di­ca­tion, instead attempt­ing to mere­ly describe the basics of this emi­nent­ly chal­leng­ing work.

Its curt­ness, its dry sense of humour and the oblique way in which it deals with glob­al pol­i­tics means that it was com­pared to the lat­er out­put of Jean-Luc Godard, though there is some­thing over­whelm­ing­ly emo­tion­al about Schanelec’s style which weak­ens the con­nec­tion. The Dreamed Path begins with a young cou­ple busk­ing some­where in Greece as a group of activists cel­e­brate their country’s entry into the Euro­pean Union. They strum out an ama­teur­ish ver­sion of ​‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ as passers by drop large ban­knotes into a hat. Ini­tial read: maybe this is an absurd com­e­dy? The phone rings. The man takes the call. He breaks down and then both head on their sep­a­rate ways.

To say any more would make the film seem like a ran­dom con­flu­ence of meet­ings and moments. And in many ways it is just that, but Schan­elec invites the view­er to lock all the frag­ments togeth­er in a way which makes sense for them. It’s a film you have to work with and step back from. It stim­u­lates those plea­sure cen­tres in the brain asso­ci­at­ed with solv­ing puz­zles and deci­pher­ing meanings. 

While the con­nec­tion between each image remains elu­sive, it’s a film in which every shot con­tains some­thing mem­o­rable about it, whether it’s the way a char­ac­ter is framed, the use of sym­me­try, the sound design or the chore­og­ra­phy of a move­ment. Maybe you could call it an exam­ple of refined chaos?

Per­haps the best way to make sense of a film like The Dreamed Path is to slide back into the director’s past to see if she has left us any clues. 2001’s Pass­ing Sum­mer is sim­i­lar in many ways, if a lit­tle eas­i­er to fol­low. It begins with two women con­vers­ing in a bar. We dis­cov­er that one is head­ing to Milan for the sum­mer on a job, and so the two part ways, with the plan being to meet up again when they’re both back in town. And, lit­er­al­ly cap­i­tal­is­ing on the promise of the title, we mon­i­tor a sum­mer that is fraught with strained rela­tion­ships, depres­sive encoun­ters, fam­i­ly ruc­tions and, even­tu­al­ly, a death.

2004’s lilt­ing, gor­geous Mar­seille doesn’t oper­ate in quite the same way, in that it is very much a film of two halves rather than a sin­gle start­ing point which splits off in var­i­ous dif­fer­ent direc­tions. A Berlin­er arrives in the French port town of the title and doesn’t appear like she real­ly has much of a plan. She wan­ders around, takes some pho­tographs and even man­ages to bor­row a car from a friend­ly mechan­ic. It feels like she’s on hol­i­day, or has decid­ed to decamp and start anew in anoth­er place. Then, sud­den­ly, her time runs out and she’s back in Berlin, and we dis­cov­er the rea­sons for her ad hoc departure.

One ele­ment that links these films is that they all con­tain peo­ple who are con­fused by the social sit­u­a­tion in which they’ve found them­selves. In The Dreamed Path, the main char­ac­ter is drift­ing away from her hus­band while hav­ing to try and keep up appear­ances, and it caus­es her a great amount of dis­tress which she des­per­ate­ly attempts to hide. In Mar­seille, the film’s two-part struc­ture reveals that the rea­sons for this woman’s escape are not entire­ly benign, and the plea­sure of being in a new place derives as much from being away from her start­ing point.

The lacon­ic After­noon, from 2007, feels like Schanelec’s bleak­est film, and the direc­tor stars as the har­ried moth­er of a depressed writer. Dur­ing a sum­mer break, he starts to expe­ri­ence sui­ci­dal pangs and she doesn’t seem equipped to cope. In terms of con­ver­sa­tion, there isn’t very much – the dia­logue com­pris­es of char­ac­ters deliv­er­ing pained mono­logues which sel­dom achieve the desired impact. It’s a bold film about feel­ings that rarely rear their head on screen for being too uncom­fort­able or, per­haps, too uncom­mer­cial. But Schanelec’s impulse seems to be that feel­ings are feel­ings, and it shouldn’t be for the gate­keep­ers of cin­e­ma to decide which ones we should talk about and which ones we shouldn’t.

Angela Schan­elec: Show­ing With­out Telling is on MUBI​.com now. The Dreamed Path screens at the Gen­e­sis Cin­e­ma on Thurs­day 10 May at 6.30. Pre-order tick­ets here.