‘My Wife Cries’ Trailer: Another Strange Trip from Festival Favorite Angela Schanelec, Now Headed to Berlin

It’s almost always reductive to compare one filmmaker to another, to say X is a combination of Y and Z. But let’s face it, it’s helpful, especially in luring cinephiles into a lesser-known director’s body of work.

If you like the patient gaze of Chantal Akerman and her tendency toward depressed types, or the framing of Robert Bresson and his refusal to throw out an emotional safety jacket, then director Angela Schanelec is for you. She’s on her tenth feature now with “My Wife Cries,” her latest film to play in the Berlin competition after she won the Silver Bear for Best Director for “I Was at Home, But” in 2019, and the Silver Bear for Best Screenplay for “Music” in 2023.

Her latest film centers on the disconnect between a blue-collar husband and his wife after an accident. “My Wife Cries” (“Meine Frau Weint” in German) premieres on Tuesday night in Berlin, and ahead of the premiere, IndieWire debuts the exclusive trailer (which is a lovely, perfectly edited, and tantalizingly off-kilter one) in the video above.

Here’s more on the film directly from the Berlinale’s program: “An ordinary workday on a building site. Forty-year-old crane operator Thomas receives a call from his wife, Carla: he has to pick her up from the hospital. Once there, he finds her crying and discovers that she has had a car crash. Carla tells him about her dance partner David, with whom she was going to view a house in the country and who has died in the accident. She tries to tell her husband everything openly and honestly, but Thomas increasingly withdraws into himself. They simply do not understand each other. A film about the challenge that is life and about the search for a common language.”

Schanelec’s films tend to be reserved in their emotion — but are not without feeling despite ambiguous, even clinical framing. At least lately, these films involve an internal family or relationship conflict that releases from the crevices of repressed emotion after an unexpected event throws routine out of order. Her breakout came in 1998 with “Places in Cities,” a coming-of-age story about a Berlin teenager who becomes pregnant during a class trip to Paris.

Film at Lincoln Center ran a retrospective of Schanelec’s films in 2020 (just before COVID), writing that her films “unearth the metaphysics rumbling beneath the placid surface of everyday life.”