Ehefrauen

To perceive the film as a "direct" reaction to Cassavetes' Husbands certainly bears fruit but categorizing Wives as "direct cinema" seems a bit distorting to me - however, the film uses a simple 16mm camera, the absence of non-diegetic music, and similar "artistic" techniques and figures, primarily capturing the speech and dialogues of the characters. But why should it be a direct documentary approach and not a method of a certain film realism and a question of (mere) aesthetic choice by the director, is not entirely clear to me: the fact is that the film is fictional, just like any other fictional film. This is not meant as an insult to the film because it works very well in achieving its goal regardless of scholastic formal classification. The disorientation of established gender roles and life goals is convincingly captured in the main protagonists' personal experiences and issues, as well as in the social environment in which they are forced to live. /// The dialogues were created with the contribution (and improvisation) of the actresses in the main roles. (24.05.2015)