Reconciliation – Director’s notes

It was the early winter of 2006 that I first had the idea that I could make a short film. I struggle with short films. The fact that they are short,
It was after watching one of Michael Haneke’s early films, 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance. I mean that in that film I saw a convention that I could use to create a construct: in that film there short fragments, of one to many, which are followed by a short cut to black, and which constitute a scene, in loose terms. This made me comfortable that I could build a story onto this structure.
I added some more rules.
In that same film Haneke has no establishing shots. He might show parts of the whole room, but he never knits it together for you. This worked well with some other ideas that I gathered from other people: Tarkovsky goes on at length at the importance of finding that shot, the one that expresses the essential of the moment. So I created another rule for myself: for every part of the story there is one shot. There is no establishing shot, no going from establishing shot, to medium shot, to close-up, then back to the establishing shot. Each shot would be built on the shoulders of the last, and be unique to what was happening at that particular moment. Only one point of view in the edit. You are not able to choose from this or that. You better get it right beforehand.

And more. One scene does not lead obviously to the next. This is not conventional drama. It is an open text. Why something happens is open to interpretation.
In effect the shots accumulate, add one on top of another. Since there is no establishing shot there is way to go back, so to speak. Only forward. This creates a momentum, which would normally have been created by the plot.

And more than that. There is no cutting on action, a minimal of dialogue (two sentences, 1 each), which consequentially means a reliance on visual storytelling, and compression and minimalism, so that little will mean more.
So how to go from one shot to the next? I had always written each part of the story with a certain pace in mind, which meant that there would be a natural progression. And in the shooting I found something else I could use: in the scenes the couple shared I created a pace for each of them that was often at odds with each other. So I had the pace of the actors, which could sometime be in contrast too.
So this allowed me to find a story that I can put over top of this construct, which I found the bathtub of my hotel in Berlin, during the Christmas of 2006.
What is this story about? As the title indicates, it is about reconciliation, in this case between an estranged couple, on the verge of separating. It is set over 1 day, starting the morning and ending in early evening, in which they never speak (almost), and find that reconciliation comes in the mundane, everyday events, not in grand gesture. In fact there is an anti-grand gesture. And finally, that this anti-grand gesture leads to a sense of the transcendent, for him at least. Their reconciliation is not romantic, but is found in an accommodation with the natural world, by which I mean the world all around them.
As the story developed I made more discoveries: that they are parting, but they are not acting normally, that is they are not acknowledging this event. I put some of this down to pride, but more fundamental is the idea of alienation and disconnection. From what? Nature? Themselves? I am not sure, I only knew there is an imbalance. And that is what I needed to show in this scene in the bedroom. So I thought of the idea of the gesture, a movement that follows hard on the way he packs his suitcase, I mean precise and detailed. This would come out of nowhere. An aberration.

January 2008