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COMING SOON TO A DECODER BOX NEAR YOU: Domestic Violence II
(Frederick Wiseman, U.S., 2003)
reviewed by by ALICE LOVEJOY
a Film Comment online exclusive
An early scene in Frederick Wisemanâs Domestic Violence II eloquently sums up the filmâs grim hypothesis: Love and violence are often inextricable from one another. A young woman, about to be taken for an overnight stay in jail on domestic violence charges against her boyfriend, protests, ăHe had me in a tight hug, and I was trying to get him off me.ä Through the cruiserâs window, the boyfriend promises to get her out in the morning, as she did for him when he was arrested for abusing her.
Unlike Domestic Violence, which was shot in The Spring, a center in Hillsborough County, Florida that provides social services for battered women and men and their abusers, this film centers on the court system in the same county÷the initial point of contact for domestic violence cases. Domestic Violence II is a more rigidly structured film than the first. A mostly stationary camera records hearings in three courtrooms. One is a ghastly invention called ăvideo court,ä in which multiple defendants are heard en masse via closed-circuit television; in the second, couples appear together in front of a judge; and the third is a small room in which only a judge, the couple involved, and their lawyers appear. Like its predecessor, this film is built around a series of stories. The cathartic narratives of the women at The Spring are replaced by a greater number of shorter stories, truncated by court schedules and framed within lawyersâ and judgesâ questions.
Though the courts interest Wiseman, documentarian of institutions, this notion that love and violence (both essentially intimate enterprises) can be such uneasy bedfellows becomes the filmâs focus÷precisely as a system. Under the directorâs gaze, the mechanisms and motivations behind partnership and love become absurd; the project of adjudicating for reason in such matters of the heart even more so. Over and over, judges ask offenders why they donât just stay away from each other. One judge queries a woman who has come to plead on her husbandâs behalf, ăWhy would you want someone out of jail who has abused you on two occasions?ä Often, the couples leaving the courtroom having dropped charges against one another look the unhappiest of all.
The film closes with a montage, beginning with shots of houses, progressing from small to palatial, ending with office buildings and a panorama of the city. Itâs a sweeping ending with a sense of genuine finality, almost monumental, as if to affirm that this system is as endemic to our society as work and commerce, homebuilding, and education. Wisemanâs strength as a filmmaker lies in his perception of our ability to build, and then entrap ourselves in, flawed systems. His earlier films take their names from the institutions they document (Welfare, High School, even Belfast, Maine), and through their subjects, strike at the heart of the matter in an emotional sense. Domestic Violence, which inverts this paradigm, is Wisemanâs bleakest film yet, and his most powerful. ÷ALICE LOVEJOY
Alice Lovejoy is the Managing Editor of Film Comment
© 2003 by The Film Society of Lincoln Center
© 2003 by Cecilia Sayad
