Some films divide audiences; Maren Vossberg's A Field of Standing Water seems designed to. Since it premiered on the festival circuit this spring, the German director's third feature has produced the rarest of receptions — standing ovations and walkouts in the same screening, often within minutes of each other. Critics who call it the year's masterpiece and critics who call it an insult to the paying public are, for once, describing exactly the same three hours of film. That is the achievement, and possibly the trap.
The premise barely qualifies as one. A woman returns to the drowned farmland of her childhood, flooded years ago for a reservoir that was never built, and spends the film waiting — for a brother who may not come, for water that may not recede. Almost nothing happens, slowly and with enormous formal control. The camera holds. The longest take runs eleven unbroken minutes on a single field at dawn, and Vossberg dares you to look away.
Slow cinema, or just slow?
This is the heart of the fight. To its admirers, the film belongs to the great tradition of slow cinema — a discipline of attention, an argument that duration itself can carry meaning that cutting destroys. To its detractors, the same patience reads as provocation dressed as profundity, a director punishing his audience and mistaking endurance for depth. Both readings are defensible, which is why the argument will not die.
I sat through it twice. The first time I was restless and faintly furious. The second, knowing what was coming, I found the long takes did something I cannot quite describe and would not undo — a slow accumulation of pressure that the film never releases, because release is precisely what it withholds. The patience is the point, but Vossberg makes you earn that conclusion, and plenty of intelligent viewers will reasonably decide it isn't worth the toll.
"I am not interested in whether the audience is comfortable. I am interested in whether they are still there at the end — and in what is left of them when the lights come up."
Maren Vossberg — director, A Field of Standing WaterThe ending is where the room finally splits for good. I will not describe it; to do so would be to break the only contract the film makes with you. It is enough to say that it refuses the catharsis the previous three hours have been quietly promising, and that this refusal is either the bravest or the most contemptuous gesture in recent European cinema. There is no third reading. You will feel cheated or you will feel wrecked.
The distribution gamble
None of which solves the problem facing its backers. A three-hour film with no stars, no plot and a deliberately alienating ending is a brutal proposition for distributors in a market already starving arthouse releases of screens. The bet — a real financial one — is that controversy travels, that the very arguments now raging will sell more tickets than any conventional campaign could. It is a gamble that fails far more often than it succeeds. But if any film could make divisiveness its distribution strategy, it is this maddening, unforgettable one. See it on the biggest screen you can find, and bring someone you are willing to disagree with. For more of the season, read our take on the festival reborn.