23/10/2024 - Anatol Schuster’s enigmatic drama follows a couple as they face life transitions, while their landlady’s strange mental breakdown disrupts people’s lives

The winner of the Best Directing Award in the International Competition of the 40th Warsaw Film Festival (see the news), Anatol Schuster’s Chaos and Silence [+see also:
trailer
film profile] is hard to define. The German filmmaker, who also wrote and produced the movie, takes us on an odd, non-linear journey, the meaning of which remains very much up to the viewer to interpret. We begin with Jean (Anton von Lucke) as he reminisces, in voice-over, about the time his landlady Klara (the fascinating Sabine Timoteo) went a little mad. Schuster intercuts images of Jean walking around Berlin with shots of Klara leaving her office job in a rush, then standing in the middle of the street, where Jean sees her – timelines collapse, as they will throughout the film and in various configurations.

This discombobulating approach to narration at first creates a mysterious and entrancing rhythm but soon becomes frustrating as Schuster struggles to bring together the various strands of his story. Jean and his wife Helena (Maria Spanring) are expecting, and then raising, a child, while facing job insecurity as a composer-conductor and a concert pianist, respectively. Commentary about modern society’s disdain for art that is less obvious yet perhaps says more about our times transpires throughout the film: Jean no longer has a home for his modern and discordant, dissonant music, and must instead play the violin at funerals; Helena navigates the demands of motherhood and sees music take up less space in her life. Meanwhile, Klara tells Jean they no longer have to pay her rent, sells all of her furniture, and moves out to live on the roof. The filmmaker seems to want to draw a line between Klara’s rejection of modern, capitalist living and the couple’s struggles with life as artists in the big city, but for much of the film, the couple and Klara evolve in almost completely separate stories, their respective developments unfolding in parallel and unrelated. Schuster’s uber-minimalist, disjointed and tonally jumbled approach makes the connection between his protagonists harder to parse, and robs it of its power.

The film moves into a more comedic register in its second half, as Klara’s seemingly absurd actions start drawing attention from the press and people moved by what they see as a political gesture. If this shift brings some much-appreciated levity, it also arrives a little late and jars with the more sincere existentialist exploration that the film had engaged in thus far. Chaos and Silence, although purposely abstract and impressionistic, would have benefited by being a little more cohesive in the progression of its ideas. Timoteo nevertheless remains a captivating presence, and Schuster’s boldness in his direction and storytelling is refreshing and to be commended.

Chaos and Silence is a German production by Zwillingfilm, and its sales are handled by Media Luna New Films.