Above Us Only Sky

CANBERRA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Those lucky enough to have seen Sandra Hüller's Berlin best actress-winning role as a deeply disturbed German school student in Hans-Christian Schmid's Requiem will already know she is a remarkable talent. For a while other German filmmakers seemed oddly reluctant to cast her in another juicy role, or perhaps she rejected any that came her way.
 
But there's no question this drama by German writer-director Jan Schonburg is worthy of her and will help to propel her to further appreciation and acclaim. Her challenging lead role here as Martha, a happily married schoolteacher who goes off the rails when two police officers arrive ominously on her doorstep, could never work with less than a subtly virtuoso performance, and Hüller more than rises to the occasion.

Martha and Paul (Felix Schmidt-Knopp) seem to enjoy a successful marriage and happy professional lives. He reports he's just been given a rave report on his postgraduate thesis, and to his wife's delight, soon after announces he's been offered a job as a neurologist in Marseilles. He goes on ahead to France, the plan being that she will join him a week later.

Readers should be aware that film is hard to write about meaningfully about without some spoilers, since shock events occur early in the narrative. [Spoiler alert] The first comes when German police tell Martha her husband has been found that dead in a Marseilles parking lot, having apparently committed suicide using a hose from his vehicle's exhaust pipe. Her initial reaction is that they have simply made a mistake. Provided with photographic evidence and a body, she decides that yes, he is dead, but that suicide could not be possible.

Further shocks are in store: information comes to light that Paul has not been truthful about his life to Martha and has clearly killed himself because he could no longer sustain the lies.

This kind of double blow would be enough to knock many people for six. Martha, however, finds a way of dealing with it that, while clearly showing signs of mental and emotional disturbance, prevents her from descending into total breakdown.
 
After a chance meeting with Alexander (Georg Friedrich), a handsome, confident history lecturer at the university where Paul was meant to have been studying, Martha starts up a new relationship, initially demanding he service her sexually. The shocked academic demurs, clearly feeling her mind is off balance and not wanting to exploit her. But they start to see each other.

Gradually it becomes clear that Martha is grooming her beau to be the new Paul, using some of her ex's methods. (She doesn't exactly lie about her recent past, but simply keeps it hidden.)

Schomburg builds the remainder of the story around a Hegel-derived theme of history repeating (the subject of one of Alexander's lectures) without hammering the point home. Hüller's handling of her character's challenging emotional journey is never less than subtle, commanding, utterly authentic and unpredictable.

I especially loved a scene where Martha merrily goads her new boyfriend by telling him he's never seen her angry side, and then demonstrating. She's behaving angrily, alright, yet without the obvious yelling and gesticulating that a lesser actor might have pulled out of the bag. And is she simply kidding him, or angry for real? That would be telling.