The compositional tropes of various high modernists, Bresson above all, loom large. Schanelec’s invention, instead, is tonal, a chording of irony and earnestness which allows her to handle the hottest emotions without ever being burned. Taken in other terms, this too looks more like refinement than invention: she is alone among her contemporaries in her capacity to reconcile the Apollonian and the Dionysian.