Review - The Left Handed Woman (1978)

Novelist Peter Handke's humane, gently inspiring directorial debut (which he adapted from his short novel) follows Marianne (Édith Clever), a German expatriate and housewife living a sleepy life in a Parisian suburb with her husband Bruno (Bruno Ganz) and their son Stefan. The morning after welcoming Bruno back from a business trip and spending the night at a hotel, Marianne suddenly and plainly demands that he move out of their home at once, and leave her to raise the boy alone. Ignoring the bewildered protestations of her husband, she rearranges her house, resumes her career as a translator, and shakily at first, but with increased resolve as the film wears on, re-learns how to live for herself.

For his first feature, Handke leans heavily on two of his cinematic idols for inspiration, close collaborator Wim Wenders and Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. From Wenders, he borrows regular actors Ganz and Rüdiger Vogler (in a charming cameo as himself), the longstanding cinematographer/ editor tandem of Robby Müller and Peter Przygodda, and the continental European milieu the two directors belonged to in the 1970's. Like the loners that populate Wenders' efforts of the period, Handke's protagonist is trapped between cultures, taken to bouts of silent introspection and wandering in search of some elusive place of belonging. Ozu, still a cult figure at the time, is lovingly referenced, twice overtly (Marianne sees his silent feature 'Tokyo Chorus' in a cinema, and a portrait of his face adorns her living room wall) and more subtly throughout the film (in the placid transitional shots, pervasiveness of trains, and the understated familial themes).

Homage aside, Handke proves himself a gifted visual storyteller with a painterly eye for tableaux, and a singular, almost rhythmic editing style. He bathes the still interiors and chilled, early-spring townscapes in golden sunlight and ponderous shadows, and utilizes clattering trains and brusque cuts like punctuation to underscore his heroine's ordeal. In its best stretches, the author turned filmmaker achieves a wordless beauty, refreshingly free of elucidation or psychology, that belies his literary calling.