Valeska Greisebach’s Longing starts with a bang—or at least with an off-screen car crash—and the camera hovers by the ear of volunteer firefighter Markus (Andreas Müller) with the nervous attachment of the films of the Dardennes brothers. But then the film settles down as Markus’ life continues on with quotidian social scenes with his wife Ella (Ilka Welz) and with his work in a metal shop. Although probably a fairly reticent young man in the first place, Markus appears silently troubled after he hears a story that the accident victims were lovers trying to kill themselves, and Markus’ rescue may have prevented both their wishes and their romantic ideal. After the accident Greisebach’s style backs away from the edginess of the Dardennes’ handheld work for a quietly observational aesthetic that emphasizes mostly her character’s silent moments, both alone and together. The script’s propensity to focus on silence eliminates the spectator’s ability to read direct cause-and-effect relationships in the film. Because of this, at first Markus’ introverted reaction to the accident is rendered somewhat opaque—was he always this inwardly drawn?—but that question is quickly subsumed by a larger one when he seemingly randomly starts up an affair with a young woman named Rose (Anett Dornbusch) during a fireman training exercise out of town.

Longing bares some resemblance to a “realistic” revision of Agnès Varda’s brilliant Le Bonheur (1965), which was about a blissful, happily married family man irrationally starting an outside affair and living this double life without qualms or worry. Varda framed this story through an exquisitely rendered pictorialism that lent every composition and every scene a kind of idealistic aesthetic beauty that both complimented the philandering man’s joyous lack of conflict in the situation, as well as undercut it with a supremely ironic, clichéd gorgeous earnestness. Greisebach’s story is much the same way, as Markus and Ella seem like newlyweds, very much in love, even if Ella seems to long for Markus in a way that her husband subtly fails to reciprocate. One may notice the large amount of “seems” and “seemingly” in this article and that is because of the supreme ambiguity wrought from the film by its slipping around events and declining to show direct motivation. Since the script elides most dialog, it is somewhat of a moot point to try and figure out whether Markus finds Rose as a person or Rose as an outsider a relief from his very small town and his predictable and insular lifestyle. More likely, and more existentially, Markus seems to find in his Rose, or at least his situation with Rose, a mysterious source for the answer to the questions unasked but nevertheless evoked by the opening accident—whether Markus’ intervention was unnatural and caused distress, and whether the romantic love felt by the suicidal lovers really exists.

In contrast to Varda’s heightened artifice, Greisebach prefers to frame her story with the style of the regular and quotidian. The places of the film are ordinary and mostly similar, and it is the actors (all non-professional) who fill them with subdued feeling and rich, if elliptical, naturalism. The director emphasizes singular bodily expressions of the actors: Dornbusch’s constant smile on the face of Rose, a kind of hopeful pleasure and appreciation of-the-moment; Müller’s languorous blinking, which can seem totally communicative in a way Markus’ few spoken words fail to be, but also function as an off-putting defensive mechanism; and, in the best performance in the film, Ilka Welz’ all-too-evident, yearning love of Ella for Markus, something that seems pained by the unspoken and unexpressed feeling that Markus, despite his love, does not feel for her exactly as she feels for him. A love scene between the two later in the film is a masterpiece of naturalistic, actorly expression and direction, as one can see in such an intimate physical action the way each character appreciates the other, with Ella hungrily trying to devour Markus, and the husband caressing her in a way that seems to hold her back, keeping her passion subtly at a distance. These yearning, simplified, low-key performances initially serve to make Longing seem like a down-to-earth reconsideration of Varda’s scenario, of approaching the hypocrisy and strangeness of a happily married man cheating on his loving and beloved wife for no apparent reason or motivation with an emphasis on existential naturalism, and of Markus falling into his experiences almost passively after he has been “let loose” or “woken up” after hearing the story behind the car accident. In effect, the lovers’ suicide attempt prompts what may be an internal reconsideration of Markus’ life (although we would never know it); but whatever the real reason, Markus strives to find in his already content life a heightened experience, and perhaps one that can reach the possibly fictional idealism of the romantic car crash.

Employing her downplayed style, Greisebach steadily takes her story into this heightened territory, as Markus returns again and again to meet Rose and begins to sow discord with his wife. The clearly irreconcilable nature of his situation, like that in Le Bonheur (where the husband wanted both parties to know about his dual relationship, which was followed by the ambiguous death of his wife), begins to lead his life down a path towards this height of extreme expression. Longing, up to now well acted and pleasantly observed but seemingly not stretching beyond that, gradually takes on the appearance of something a bit more arch, perhaps a self-created tragedy. Markus’ unknowing and humanly amateur flailing towards something different, something else, takes on that aura of romance and idealism, but only in a bitterly ironic way, as his situation is untenable and will never lead to the kind of mutual, total, and totalizing act as a lovers’ suicide. The romantic height he reaches is one he reaches alone, and in tragedy. By the end, the perfectly titled Longing assumes a painful devastation as the quotidian that longs to be romantic becomes so only by taking the path alone, in introverted solitude. And, in a stunning and bold conclusion to such an unassuming work, where local children discuss Markus’ actions as if it were a local myth or legendary story, Greisebach’s modest film becomes a subtly grand achievement, a search for the special outside of the everyday, when the everyday is in fact where it existed all along—in the way we tell, believe, and live in the stories around us.