Fragmentation It is a pity that up to this interesting picture was written only one, besides frankly stupid, talentless, superficial review. Well, it's time to change things.
This long but curious film by Philip Groening runs almost 3 hours and is divided into 59 chapters - short fragments, some lasting only a few seconds. With German pedantry, the beginning and end of each chapter are signed, they are simply numbered. It seems that the chapters could not be signed at all. However, there is a strict protocol. Protocol of what?
What at first seems to be a mere writing, an aesthetic framing of everyday life, is in fact an ultimate look into reality. Groening’s camera, and he is also an operator here, is objectively detached, then extremely intimate with the characters. But reality itself is fragmented, devoid of beginning and end, and thus resembles a dream. We never remember the beginning of sleep, and when we wake up, we are deprived of its possible continuation. Every chapter is the middle of something, it's a piece taken out. Groening managed to make a movie where there is no time. It's frozen here, turned into nothing.
We see the childhood of a little girl and at the same time the childhood of all three. In childhood, there is no time, time appears with growing up, and then everything accelerates and accelerates. In special chapters, each character sings a children's song on camera, first separately, and then they sing together. The adults here are like children. Groening shows them genuinely happy in idyllic episodes and deeply unhappy in episodes where their crisis is exposed.
Police officer Owe is mentally disturbed. At work, he observes death, keeps professionally, externally impartial and calm, and at home periodically breaks down on his wife because of trifles. He commits senseless, unmotivated violence against his wife, and this violence is the ultimate expression of his helplessness. However, the episodes of assault in the film are few, much more fragments, which show the consequences of beatings - bruises on the body of Christina, the title character. And, I must say, these hematomas give an impression much more painful than violent outbursts of anger.
Christina finds herself in love with her daughter. She's gentle and caring with her. The episode of joint bathing in the bath, filmed in a light rapid, reveals this unity of mother and child as much as possible. They exist in the clear, plastic water from which they are made, in which life originated. Uwe loves his daughter, too. He loves his wife and frankly admits that he can not without her. One shot of the film almost repeats the famous shot of Annie Leibovitz, which depicted John Lennon and Yoko Ono. In general, if you remove all episodes directly or indirectly related to violence from the tape, you will get a movie about an endlessly happy family. But in the picture, heaven and hell are simultaneously.
Some chapters show a silent old man. Groening does not explain his presence in the tape. But this old man looks a lot like Ove. It can be assumed that this is Uve himself in old age, he lives out his last days, immersed in memories and reflection. This strange character does not get out of the picture, just as the fox running past does not get out, although the fox inevitably has the connotation of Trier’s ' Antichrist'. There are also chapters, a kind of haiku, in which there are no people at all, for example, a few seconds of interior, or nature, or white pigeons. Groening, with all the chamber nature of the picture, creates such a huge field for interpretations, such freedom where there is nothing to cling to (more precisely, it is not clear what to cling to in the first place), that at first you just get lost.
For the first time you watch ' The Policeman's Wife' more like a thriller, because you don't know what will be shown in the next episode. How will it end? Will it be an unbearable sight or not? The second time you look (or play in your head) like a drama. Not as a psychological drama, but as an ontological drama. After all, the main question of ontology is ' What is it?'. And this fragmented structure of the film with its dome-dreams almost calls into question the existence of reality.
Groening creates his own unique cinematic language in just one film, but this is the language for only one film. That is, development, but development is deadlocked. Because it is impossible to increase such fragmentation without falling into the wild avant-garde.