Despite boasting an international cast,The Left-Handed Woman is an understated and unadorned portrayal of a single mother’s quotidian life, comparable in its sensibility to some of the work of Margarethe von Trotta, Helke Sander, and Helma Sanders-Brahms.
Edith Clever (the star of Eric Rohmer’s Kleist adaptation, The Marquise of O) plays Marianne, a German living in Paris with her young son, Stefan. Her husband Bruno Ganz (Wings of Desire) returns from Helsinki, where he has spent several months and learned only one word in Finnish: olut (‘beer’).
After a night of luxurious squandering in a hotel restaurant—where Bruno admires the centuries-old feudal tradition that headwaiter Michael Lonsdale (Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses) represents—Marianne tells Bruno they should separate. The film is thus framed as a chronicle of this new turn in Marianne’s life: she resumes working as a translator, oscillates between resentment and tenderness toward her son, dreads Bruno’s increasingly aggressive visits, and becomes closer with Franziska, a German expatriate elementary school teacher played by Angela Winkler (Schlöndorff’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Bloom). Read more.
THE LEFT-HANDED WOMAN
a.k.a. Die linkshändige Frau
Dir. Peter Handke, 1978
West Germany, 119 min.
In German and French with English subtitles.
Sunday, August 24, 7:30pm, $5
Spectacle Theatre
http://www.spectacletheater.com/
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