I Was at Home, But...

Part of my coverage of the 55th Chicago International Film Festival.

I WAS AT HOME, BUT...   **

Angela Schanelec

2019

IDEA:  Astrid struggles to keep her life together in the wake of her husband's death, while her children deal with the loss in their own way.

BLURB:  To some extent, the fractured, heavily decentered narrative approach and anti-naturalism Angela Schanelec employs in I Was at Home, But… are appropriate and intriguing. They make sense insofar as they communicate something of the film’s various states of grief, isolation, and generational distance, rooting its pervasive disconnect in an aesthetic experience that feels similarly cagey and out of reach. The problem is, Schanelec has so abstracted her narrative, and has made both its emotions and its form so willfully evasive, that the film struggles to achieve coherence. There are individually lovely moments here – a montage set to a forlorn cover of “Let’s Dance” is especially striking, as is a protracted, long-take diatribe that hilariously upends the film’s (and lead character’s) reticence – but their connective tissue is tenuous, and the themes and ideas that surround them are too obfuscated by labored conceits to really register as more than pieces of an abstruse exercise. This could be read as an auto-critique, reflecting Astrid’s contempt for the “fakeness” of mimetic performance and her insistence that actors can never really capture people’s internal realities. Schanelec certainly affirms this notion through her film’s deliberate remoteness and impassivity, but to what point is insufficiently clear.