19/10/2023 - Laura Schroeder delivers a singular, atmospheric and clinical fiction film about dissociative amnesia, the quest for the self and Deep Brain Stimulation

"Left to our own devices, we are simply too primitive to face the society we have built." With her 3rd feature film, Maret, having its French premiere in the Perspectives section of the 14th La Roche-sur-Yon International Film Festival, Luxembourg filmmaker Laura Schroeder (appreciated for Barrage [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Laura Schroeder
film profile] at the 2017 Berlinale) explores with intriguing originality the narrow path between existence and disappearance, at the heart of the life and personality of a woman plunged in the darkness of severe dissociative amnesia following a stroke. 

"The synapses have to be connected in a totally new way for our behaviour to change." Maret (German actress Susanne Wolff), 44 years old, is attentively listening to Dr. Moore (Danish actress Iben Hjejle) because since that moment a few months ago when she collapsed in the middle of the countryside, she has been floating in a ghostly zone: she has forgotten everything of the last 20 years of his life, her partner Thomas (German actor Stephan Kampwirth) is a complete stranger for her, and her daily life as an artist working in advertising has completely vanished. She therefore decides to leave for the Canary Islands, to Lanzarote, where Dr. Moore and her team lead research on Deep Brain Stimulation, with a potential operation in the future. First of all, tests will allow to establish a brain map for Maret ("the way you deal with fear, your capacity for empathy, your inhibition threshold"), but the further the process goes, the more the veil imperceptibly lifts on her past, and the more Maret rediscovers her personality, under a light that is not always very flattering. On the edge of the abyss, she will have to choose: to recover her memory and return to the way things were before while trying to identify the cause of her brain collapse, or to seize the opportunity (as distressing as it is) of an operation that would free her, allowing her to become somebody new?

Written by the director together with Judith Angerbauer, the script turns out to be a complex construction, always placing the viewer in the point of view of a protagonist in a disorientated state, floating in search of an ungraspable way out, progressively shedding light on her own self through encounters with key characters from her past. Developing in parallel is a fascinating intellectual immersion in the scientific nuts and bolts of Deep Brain Stimulation. A film both atmospheric and clinical, emotional and enigmatic, a very singular mix at times nearly opaque, in this space where buried wounds echo in the distance, troubling the surface. Never seeking to please (but crafting a very solid sound and visual work, especially with the powerful landscapes of Lanzarote), the filmmaker is like a seismic detector and ventures where “the mind remembers what the soul can bear.” In the image of Maret, this immersion into malaise is sometimes a little too suggestive and disjointed in its second half, but the excellent final straight line confirms a captivating and uncompromising film. The work of a true artist. 

Maret was produced by Luxembourg’s Red Lion and Germany’s Red Balloon.

(Translated from French)