‘My Wife Cries’ Review: A Wry Relationship Drama Whose Delights Don’t Always Cohere

Angela Schanelec’s wry relationship drama “My Wife Cries” is filled with lengthy conversations delivered in dry, sardonic tones, which secretly brim with withheld emotion. The tale of a couple growing apart, their distance exacerbated by a traumatic event, the film’s use of space, dialogue and bodies paves intriguing inroads into character psychologies that remain just out of reach, yielding a work of minor absurdities that’s as frustrating as it is fascinating — and often feels endless, for better or worse.  

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Opening on the plain white office walls of a Berlin construction site — its 4:3 frame is practically a blank, square-ish canvas — the film introduces lanky protagonist Thomas (Vladimir Vulević) during a routine administrative wait. His preschool teacher wife has called him, though he doesn’t yet know why. In the meantime, he chats with two of his female coworkers about topics as mundane as the price of couches, and as meaningful as having children (and hypothetically losing them), all with the same withdrawn cadence, as if the two subjects were of exactly equal importance. Even before there’s a hint of plot, the film’s approach to conversation is off-kilter enough to make you lean forward, but relaxing enough in tone that you can zone out too.

This paradox of tempo carries over when Thomas, sometime later in the day, finds his wife Carla (Agathe Bonitzer) anxiously crying on a bench, before she confesses to getting into a car accident alongside her dance partner David, a man she was having an emotional affair with, who has now tragically died. It’s an electric dilemma presented with the utmost restraint and minimalism, including a lack of score. At times, the frame is so quiet and motionless it feels like a still image. This is perhaps what imbues the film with such a dynamic quality when it finally employs even the simplest of camera movements, like a lengthy tracking shot at dusk that follows the couple as they argue on the way home, making Berlin’s public spaces feel strange and lonely in the process.

These stylistic parameters, however, feel established purely so the film can wrestle against them, which works up to a point. Carla’s conversations with friends and acquaintances circle existential subject matter that, for her, emanates from a place of survivor’s guilt — or at least a necessary re-assessment of her life, having nearly died. They involve topics like the ways in which words can fill the space between people. It’s a naked signaling of theme that might help guide less patient viewers towards a better understanding of Schanelec’s audiovisual approach, but “My Wife Cries” is intentionally more challenging than rewarding even to those on its wavelength. It bears the appearance of a film by Finnish maestro Aki Kaurismäki — an easy comparison — but its soul is far closer to that of Hong Sangsoo, in the way it attempts to elevate banality.

It doesn’t always succeed, especially as a film where dialogue becomes far less meaningful as it goes on — and simultaneously, far more prevalent, in the form of lengthy monologues. However, the rich subtext of its casting adds a whole new layer that often promises to supersede these self-reflexive gestures. The women on screen are mostly androgynous in the way they dress, do their hair, and generally present themselves, and they circle spaces (like construction sites) with distinctly masculine energies. When paired with frequent discussions of sex and motherhood, this speaks to a certain anxiety surrounding gender expressions and expectations, which the film seldom allows to bloom. However, that it’s present at all makes it more alluring than your run-of-the-mill drama about a relationship breaking down.

In fact, the most entertaining part of this obliteration is the way the film’s aesthetics seem to morph to match it, between harsh noises (like a brass band) overwhelming conversations on the street, and the seemingly random, stage-like reappearance of previously seen characters, now blocked as if for the theatre. “My Wife Cries” is, at times, wonderfully odd, even though its most delightful ideas and puzzle pieces don’t quite cohere by the end.