REVIEW:

Berlin-based Angela Schanelec, a stage actress turned film Autorin, writes, directs, edits, and acts in her films. Her theme, ever since her student days at the Berlin Film Academy (DFFB), is the big city ­ »no particular city,« she once said, »as long as it’s big and noisy.« Each is an absorbing, light-handed, realistic portraits of people and everyday events. In Ich bin den Sommer über in Berlin geblieben (I Stayed in Berlin All Summer) (1993), her debut fiction short of 50 minutes, Schanelec herself plays Nadine, who is obsessed by a memory linked to a haunting tune she can no longer sing ­ until she hears someone else singing it and everything falls into place.

Das Glück meiner Schwester (My Sister’s Happiness) (1995), her DFFB diploma feature awarded the 1996 German Critics Prize, is the story of a love triangle in Berlin. Christian, a photographer, is in love with both Isabel (Angela Schanelec), a translator, and Ariane, her half-sister, who in turn loves Christian and is afraid of losing him. Schanelec probes just how far such a relationship can progress. Plätze in Städten (Places in Cities) (1998), her second feature, took up where My Sister’s Happiness left off. Mimmi (Sophie Aigner), a reserved 19-year old about to face her matriculation exams, leaves on a school trip to Paris ­ where she meets a man, spends a night with him, returns home to Berlin, and later discovers she’s pregnant. Although her exams are now drawing closer, she makes the decision to return to Paris. As is usual in the Schanelec style of directing, the story unfolds in fragments: we watch a girl, whose primary contacts are mother and school, as she crosses the threshold to womanhood.

In Mein langsames Leben (Passing Summer) (2001), Schanelec’s third feature, she observes with a static camera a chain of encounters over the summer months among a group of friends and acquaintances. Since most of them are in their thirties, they are now conscious that some life-long decisions have to be made. And in Marseille, programmed in the Un Certain Regard section at this year’s Cannes festival, she is back in France with another city tale of loneliness and a lost love. Sophie (Marie Eggert), a photographer, exchanges her Berlin apartment with a French girl for hers in Marseille. There she wanders aimlessly in February through the gloomy, colorless port city ­ but in search of what? One day, she meets Pierre, a young auto-mechanic, and later they continue their conversation in a bistro ­ the nicest scene in the film ­ until their reverie is broken by a third person who just happens to stop by. Back in Berlin, we discover why Sophie has gone to Marseille in the first place. She is in love with Ivan, the husband of her best friend. Feeling that a line has to be drawn somewhere, Sophie packs her troubles on her back and departs again for Marseilles. »All my films deal with the idea that a major part of life is inexplicable, full of misunderstandings, and determined by chance,« said Angela Schanelec. Nowhere better stated than in Marseille.

Dorothea Moritz