Eva leads us through this film. We’re with her in moments before and after cameras turn on normally.
What is the character of a politician’s wife? On the one hand we know a lot about these people, politicians of all levels of power and relevance, their spouses – and on the other hand – hardly anything. It is very interesting how these relationships or love lives can become matters of state or at least matters of a city or any political or social entity.
What is private? What is public? How can you politically exploit your own relationship, your wife, your children, your family? How can you defend it, how can you be private in the eye of constantly increasing public interest? Antonioni once said his films would be about “private matters in public spaces”. What about today, when private matters become increasingly public and also our own way of perception changes?
The film is about that part of our society that actually really holds power. Conflicts develop differently here. There’s not much that isn’t undoable. A Politician’s Wife takes place in such a world, but it is a very private story. Power and its abuse should be visible in the mutations of the people and in the traces it leaves in their actions.
In that sense, the film is also very much about Eva’s body as opposed to the abstraction of politics, bureaucracy and power.