Title: Die Frau des Polizisten (The Police Officer’s Wife)
Director: Philip Gröning
Starring: Alexandra Finder, David Zimmershied, Pia & Chiara Kleeman, Horst Rehberg.
The feature film, winner of the Special Jury Award at the 70th Venice Film Festival, sets a light on the important theme of femicide, with a peculiar narrative choice that splits the story into 59 chapters, each bookended by numbered “Beginning of Chapter” (Anfang Kapitel) and “End of Chapter” (Ende Kapitel).
The almost three-hour look at domestic abuse in provincial Germany focuses on some random scenes from the life of young policeman Uwe, who often works the night shift, and his stay-at-home wife Christine and little daughter Clara, suggesting that his outbursts of violence are part of an otherwise normal and happy relationship.
The profound and delicate theme is confronted as several pieces of a puzzle that the audience decides to assemble as preferred. There’s a strong love story between mother and daughter, and how the maternal figure tries to protect her cub from a world of violence, introducing her child to the beauties of nature through simple and poetic games. There’s a conflictual man and woman relationship, where the female figure annuls herself to save her husband, whom she adores, who hits her irrationally. And as passive observer to these circumstances there’s an old man, silent and helpless: embodying the contemporary Greek chorus, where his role reflects society’s approach to the theme confronted by the drama, i.e. apathy and indifference.
But the choice of European distribution certainly doesn’t want to tackle the subject matter with negligence: the movie will be out in theatres on November 25th, International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.
Philip Gröning, the director who had established himself with his Carthusian monks documentary ‘Into Great Silence,’ has given a voice, with ‘Die Frau des Polizisten’ (The Police Officer’s Wife), to a topic that for too long has been kept in silence.
Technical: A
Acting: A
Story: A
Overall: A
Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi
