‘I Was At Home, But…”: Angela Schanelec’s Enigmatic Domestic Portrait [NYFF Review]

Filmmaker Angela Schanelec is an acquired taste. Her latest, “I Was At Home, But…” sees her continue to hone her highly unique, emotionally oblique, and gently radical style, which frustrates some with its lack of a unitary “meaning,” but delights others for the multiplicity of possible meanings that “lack” engenders. Schanelec is often thought of in the Berlin School, but her latest film eschews that group by minimizing any specifically German aspects of the setting, instead, exploring more universal notions of the domestic; likewise the contemporary is minimized in favor of the classical, finding frequent reference points in both Shakespeare and old master paintings. “I Was At Home, But…” probes the mystery of our closest connections. The domestic sphere is supposed to be an intimate refuge from a chaotic world, but the ellipsis in the title suggests the array of doubts and shadows that can come between a mother and her children.

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After an enigmatic animal prologue, among the many nods to Bresson, Schanelec introduces Astrid (Maren Eggert), a mother of two whose twelve-year-old Philip (Jakob Lassalle) has just disappeared with no explanation. While the audience only sees their reunion afterward, in which she drapes herself over his feet in one of several tableaux recalling classical paintings, the mysterious absence injects a sense of misgiving into everything that follows. But what follows for Astrid is almost impossible to describe in narrative terms, a series of strange encounters, endowed with import by Schanelec’s piercing focus, which shows the existential unease lurking at the edge of Astrid’s life. As she goes through daily tasks like grocery shopping or buying a used bike, we learn in piecemeal fashion that Astrid’s theater director husband died two years prior (as did Schanelec’s) and Astrid seems to be unsure in her decision to have children, at times lashing out in excessive anger but at others assuming the poses of a classical Madonna figure.

Two other threads are interwoven with Astrid’s. First, the children in Philip’s class recite sections of “Hamlet” in a somewhat unnerving monotone, standing stock-still. Philip himself is the fatherless prince, returned after an absence to his childhood home, which he utterly destroys. The third thread of the film consists of two teachers (Franz Rogowski, Lilith Stangenberg) in the midst of breaking up – he wants to stay together and have kids because he is scared of ‘vanishing,’ but she rejects this domestic vision. These three threads are linked by thematic undercurrents, but they feel strikingly dissimilar at times because Schanelec uses different modes of performance in each. A former theater actor, Schanelec seems to be probing the range of stylization possible in performance, from the children’s flat recitations to the inherent naturalism of animals, to more traditional actor moments like Astrid’s impassioned ten-minute monologue berating the director of a film she’s seen (part of).

The preceding description has far more order than the film itself, which is built of scenes in Schanelec’s signature style, strangely beautiful long takes with mesmeric sound design that frustrates conventional modes of conveying meaning, while opening up others. “I Was At Home, But…” is not a film for anyone who needs fixed meaning or resolution, but is a welcome pleasure for those who enjoy the freedom to make their own connections from Schanelec’s hall of mirrors. [A-]

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