The French filmmaker Robert Bresson once said: “Hide the ideas, but so that people find them. The most important will be the most hidden.” In “I Was at Home, but…,” the German director Angela Schanelec seems to have taken her ideas and stashed them deep in a private vault. Every so often, though, she cracks open this movie — with a line, an image, a snatch of a song — offering you fugitive glimpses of an intensely personal world. (It won her the best director award at the 2019 Berlin Film Festival.)
“I Was at Home, but …” begins with a hare being chased by a dog across a rugged, bleached-out rural landscape. It’s a tense race for life — the hare is fast, the dog too — and invokes countless scenes of endangered bunnies, including in Renoir’s “Rules of the Game.” (Schanelec’s title, in turn, seems to nod at Ozu’s “I Was Born, but…”) The chase appears to end with the hare resting among an outcropping of rocks. This is followed by a brief, enigmatic interlude of a charming donkey wandering in a derelict house where the dog tears at a small, dead animal, presumably our hapless hare.
After this mysterious opener, we cut to a girl in a red coat sitting alone on a curb in deep twilight, framed by a stand of trees in the background, a backpack next to her. The combination of the color of the coat, the isolation of the girl and the crepuscular woods brings to mind Little Red Riding Hood, an association that settles in your mind like an unformed thought. A boy — later revealed to be the son of the protagonist — walks by wordlessly. A few beats later there’s a shot of him in front of a brick building, where the buzzing of exterior lights mixes with bird calls and insects whirs.
Not long after, the movie shifts to a classroom where a girl recites a line from “Hamlet”: “Nor earth to me give food, nor heaven light!” In the original, these words are spoken by the Player Queen in the play within the play, when she insists she would never remarry, an allusion that — like the Red Riding Hood imagery — settles in your head as a possible clue. As you cast about for meaning, you may remember Hamlet’s mother, the real queen, who in this same section says, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” This isn’t something one could say of Schanelec, whose narrative approach is austere and elliptical, and whose intentions can be so inscrutable that “I Was at Home, but …” can feel like a private reverie rather than one meant for sharing.
The dog and the donkey return at the end of the movie, again without overt explanation. Between these bookended scenes, Schanelec focuses on a series of acquaintances, notably a woman, Astrid (Maren Eggert), who lives with her two children, including the boy seen earlier, who seems to have returned after a cryptic absence. Over time and outwardly disparate scenes — Astrid buys a used bicycle, comically harangues a filmmaker and visits her son’s teachers — a hazy yet moving mosaiclike portrait of this lonely, melancholic woman emerges. And while you end up knowing little about Astrid, you sense (and feel) her grief, which saturates this movie.
Throughout, Schanelec’s color and framing are impeccable, the shots harmoniously balanced. She uses a lot of natural light, which imparts a near-radiant glow to some of the compositions and particularly to faces. The beauty of these visuals goes a long way to keeping you tethered to “I Was at Home, but…,” as do your own well-conditioned attempts to wrest a story from a movie that seems reluctant to offer you one. In most mainstream cinema, the story tugs you along — or prods you into its mazelike corridors and toward dead ends — encouraging you to wonder what happens next. Schanelec offers next to no such prompts, trusting that you’ll keep watching anyway.
Whether you do will largely depend on your enjoyment of (or tolerance for) narrative ellipses, and your curiosity about how these faces, quotes, allusions and interstitial moments together create meaning. Sometimes, as with the girl in red, Schanelec seems to be drawing from a culturally shared storehouse of images, using certain visuals for their associative or symbolic resonance. That appears to be the case too with the donkey, whose presence may be a reference to the title figure in Bresson’s masterpiece “Au Hasard Balthazar.” This allusion, though, only becomes evident after — and if — you recognize that her precise framing also owes a great debt to Bresson.
His influence is also apparent in the performances, which can be borderline affectless. The exception is Eggert, whose quiet eloquence serves as an anchor even when her face is drained of visible emotion, an emptiness that makes its flashes of animation more effective than they might otherwise be. In one of the most touching interludes, Astrid lies on the ground as a man sings Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” on the soundtrack, the song continuing over a flashback of her and her kids dancing in a hospital room. Their audience remains offscreen, though you guess it’s the father who haunts this story. And then Astrid smiles, creating a small shock that turns into a stab of feeling as you remember the moment when the Player Queen says “If, once a widow, ever I be wife!”
I Was at Home, but …
Not rated. In German, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
