From exposure to pieces of the broken
- Films scheduled in Tabakalera always have to be paid attention, as in addition to offering works that are rarely seen in the commercial rooms, they tend to take risks, allowing to see on large screen unusual cinematic languages. Last Saturday was no exception: Der traumhafte Weg (The Oneiric Route), by German director Angela Schanelec, was projected to report the ruptures of two couples with 30 years of separation and apparently no connection between them.
It is a film that requires the senses to be awake, because it is evident that each plane is taken in a very measured way, with perfectionism, and that the director has intended to evoke something beyond the images.
In this regard, the election of Schanelec has frequently reminded me of the apocryphal phrase attributed to the writer Anton Chejov: “Don’t say the moon shines; show me the glow of light in the broken glass.”
That is, if you are asked if you have to “tell” or “show” stories, Schanelec probably chooses the second one: the characters of this work are seen and you have to draw conclusions from what we see, with the help of somewhat hieratic dialogues and representations that do not tell much about their emotional state.
Add to that the game you do over time: From the 1980s to the present, the film is divided into four different periods, but we are not given great clues to discover it – just a television news report before the fall of the Berlin Wall, mobile phones or a bookshelf empty of books.
We are dealing with a fragmented film in which each scene has its own entity and a tone that gathers the whole movie that matters as much as the story that needs to be told.
It is true that the relationship between the two partners did not seem sufficiently justified to me at the time I finished the film. Then I talked to my friends, I started to think, I made the second and third possible reading of what I had seen, I tried to understand the sense of being the protagonists in a conflicting Greece at first, I realized that the end is in Berlin, and I wondered if everything has a political dimension.
The director tells me not in an interview I met with my friend Google. But this film about pair breaks can work, at the same price, as an allegory of the European project, from young people who wanted to get money to travel singing joyful songs on the street, to the scale that currently lives on the street. Being a work that shows a question mark and leaves the answer in the hands of the viewer, of course, it is only a possible reading.
On 9 June, at the same Tabakalera, you will be able to enjoy other performances, with subtitles in Basque.
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