Maret: riding on the wake of neurosurgical vanguard
Luxembourg-born writer and film director Laura Schroeder might be one of the Grand Duchy’s leading cinematic visionaries. Barrage, her first feature-length film, premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2017 and went on to be Luxembourg’s entry for best foreign language film at the Oscars.
Her most recent film, Maret, which premiered at this year’s Luxembourg City Film Festival, similarly aims high, although its dreamlike quality and ruminative pace leave its more existential questions in the backseat.
The titular Maret, played by a fantastic Susanne Wolff, a German artist living with her long-term boyfriend, is abruptly struck by a severe case of dissociative amnesia and, in an instant, loses all memory of the last 20 years. She re-enters her own life totally alienated as she fails to recognise her friends, her house, her boyfriend, and even her own art. Having been forced to press a psychological reset button, she receives a call from a mysterious neurosurgeon based in the Canary Islands who promises that she can help her. With little else to hold on to, Maret decides to go.
The bulk of the film’s action takes place on Lanzarote and its windswept, volcanic landscape, and it is against this backdrop - where the barrenness of the landscape matches the barrenness of Maret’s mind - that the film comes into its own. Maret is subjected to strange experiments by Doctor Moore (Iben Hjejle), whose obliqueness certainly doesn’t help Maret find her bearings.
The intrusive and radical procedure on Maret’s brain isn’t a simple restoration of her memories but rather modifies her behaviour to make her more docile. Maret, in a fit of rage, refuses and promptly quits the doctor’s treatment and facility.
She wanders the volcanic island for a decent stretch of the runtime in a daze, and it’s possible to lose the narrative thread along the way. The film enters a long, meditative period where not much is said and the protagonist is left to dejectedly ruminate. To the rhythm of long stares, meaningless meandering and a healthy dose of drinking, Maret’s core is consciously a void - for better or for worse.
In the midst of this hollow period of Maret’s life, her long-term boyfriend arrives on the island, although it’s not all hugs and smiles. He’s furious that she abruptly left for a treatment on the Canary Islands and never returned. He tells her that she was actually quite difficult as a person before her fugue state and has no intention of getting back together with her. But this sequence too melts into the film’s blurry, dreamlike narrative.
Maret potters on for a good while longer and then returns to Germany - a decision with traumatic consequences. But it’s as if the film can never really shake off that post-sleep haze, and some of the mysterious dynamics of the first half are themselves lost to a lingering fugue. The first half sees an amnesiac travel to a far-off island to partake in a mysterious procedure led by a creepy doctor. The second half feels like one long sleepwalk.
But while Maret does run out of steam a little, it nevertheless raises some interesting questions regarding memory and the human mind. For one, the sequence in Lanzarote where the amnesiac is left to wander the barren landscape makes for a fantastic piece of narrative cinematography - even if it does feel a little long-winded. Then there’s the artist no longer recognising her own art.
The film rides on the wake of the neurosurgical vanguard, making it an interesting case of reality being much closer to sci-fi than one might have thought.
Maret certainly puts viewers in the shoes of a retrograde amnesiac since the audience is just as unfamiliar with its protagonist’s life as she is. And although the momentum drops to a steady, Sunday-afternoon-walk pace for much of the runtime, there is a lot of time to reflect on the nature of memory and consciousness that leaves the audience excited for what Laura Schroeder has in store next.
The Luxembourg Times has a new mobile app, download here! Get the Luxembourg Times delivered to your inbox twice a day. Sign up for your free newsletters here.
