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Dirk Bogarde made a career from playing roles in which his face, often an impassive mask, betrays emotion through almost imperceptible shifts and ticks. In The Servant, this gift for nuance is wasted in the service of a film that doesn’t seem to know where it wants to go, and thus seems to leave Bogarde unsure of whom he is supposed to be.

Ostensibly, he is Hugo Barrett, a “gentleman’s gentieman,” hired by Tony (James Fox), whose downward spiral into alcoholism is foreshadowed at their first meeting, when Barrett comes upon Tony passed out in an alcove of his recently purchased, but as yet unrenovated London townhouse. Just had “a couple beers at lunch” Tony rationalizes when awakened.

Although his expensive clothes and handsome unlined face suggest aristocratic roots, Tony’s fine exterior masks a man of weak character, one with poor judgment and a singular lack of self-discipline.

Barrett sizes Tony up quickly, and sets to work ingratiating himself with his master, whose general helplessness and almost constant drunkenness makes him an easy mark for Barrett’s schemes.

First, Barrett foments conflict between Tony and his girlfriend Susan (Wendy Craig). As their relationship founders, Barrett brings a new woman into the household, Vera (Sarah Miles), whom he presents as his sister and a housekeeper. Vera’s actual purpose is to tempt and seduce Tony, which she does with pathetic ease, further alienating him from Susan and cementing his dependence on Barrett.

It is about at this point in the film when the viewer begins to wonder where things are headed.

The discomfiture I felt upon starting to watch Fear of Fear, my first exposure to the work of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, had less to do with the painful plight of its protagonist, the beautiful, chameleon-like Margot, played by Margit Carstensen, and more to do with the film-making itself, which immediately places one in a strange universe that feels at odds with many of the usual conventions of movie-making.

There is a spareness to Fassbinder’s work here which I struggled not to dismiss as evidence of amateurishness. In his October 15, 1976 New York Times review of the film, Vincent Canby remarked that “compared to a full-scale portraitist like Bernardo Bertolucci, [Fassbinder] is a sketch artist, but the sketches are singular.”

There are certainly the strong lines of a skillful sketch artist in the film, but also what feel like less masterly strokes, as in the techniques that appear as unimaginative defaults: a repetitive and ominous sound track, along with a swirling visual distortion that seems intended to denote Margot’s periods of mental disturbance; the tendency to resort to a rapid zoom close-up as a kind of exclamation mark, emphasizing an emotional moment or climax; and fade-out/fade-in transitions between scenes that feels dated and off-putting, periodically distancing us from the flow of the film.

Fassbinder’s “sketch” technique gives us a film in which very little does not contribute to the exploration of Margot’s mercurial mental condition, the film’s plot, if it can be said to have one. This minimalism results in claustrophobic settings — few scenes take place outside the depressing apartment she shares with her husband Kurt (Ulrich Faulhaber), and her two children, and fewer still occur outside the scope of the encompassing city block, which contains (in the same apartment building) Margot’s interfering in-laws and, next door, the office of Mr. Bauer (Kurt Raab), a somehow generic “doctor,” of handsome visage and reassuring manner, Margot’s sometime lover.

In deciding whether the film’s tight and unrelenting focus is a positive or a negative, one must perhaps understand what it is that Fassbinder is seeking to create. Certainly the claustrophobia mimics Margot’s feelings of being locked inside the roles of mother, wife, closely-watched in-law.

Too, Fear of Fear seems somehow more a work of ideas than of events. Certainly the film’s limited scope and cinematographic carelessness, combined with the intensity of mood in tandem with the indeterminate nature of Margot’s problem suggests an existential crisis, one which is perhaps resistant to film realism, and which is best shown as Fassbinder chooses to.

Further, her problem is never clearly identified by any medical professional (one specialist says she is a schizophrenic, another says she is definitely not). These specialists share only a belief in drugs as the remedy for Margot’s condition. The fact that the diagnoses are so mixed seems a sly suggestion that no physical malady can adequately encapsulate what it is that ails her.

And, as with the diagnoses, so with the result does Fassbinder seem to show a cynical detachment and an unwillingness to achieve a neat resolution. At the behest of one specialist who suggests that Margot find meaning in work, and is delighted to find that she has a “skill” (she can type), the patient is dutifully tapping away on a typewriter when her brother-in-law, aware of her intimate relations with Mr. Bauer, attempts to show sensitivity in alerting her, before the news becomes public, that the doctor has just committed suicide by hanging himself.

Margot takes the news in stride, insisting that she is “so calm, perfectly calm,” barely looking up from the keyboard. But, Fassbinder seems to suggest, the only progress she has made is in more successfully anesthetizing herself. In this German world of work, square corners and hard edges, someone like Margot can never be anything but not calm.

Is it a French thing? How is it possible for movies to be emotional without ever straying into sentimentality, both philosophical and powerfully vulnerable, essentially hopeful in matters of the heart without sacrificing unflinching realism?

This is the tightrope that Mia Hansen-Løve walks in the three films leaving the Criterion Channel in January. I hurried to watch all three in the waning days of the month, and found myself increasingly absorbed by Hansen-Løve’s universe. As I watched the films, in no particular order, each in turn became my favorite until, as I finished “Goodbye, First Love” (2011), the total effect was palpable absorption into Hansen-Løve’s approach to filmmaking.

Thematically, “Goodbye, First Love,” “Things to Come” (2016), and “Father of My Children” (2009) share an interest in the struggles of couples, tested or enlarged by the introduction of a third person. And, while serene love may be the ideal, it is, realistically, largely absent. Hansen-Løve explores most acutely the ways coupling can go wrong.

In each, the main setting is Paris, with occasional forays into the countryside for reflection, as though certain kinds of emotional developments demand a pastoral setting. Hansen-Løve’s characters are old and young, rich and not.

Class struggle is an underlying theme, but it is not a large one, and seems to exist more to ground and prove the characters than as part of some political agenda.

In “Things …,” Isabelle Hubert’s character Nathalie, an aging Philosophy professor, is confronted by a politically-involved former student Fabien (Roman Kolinka). “You don’t let everyday behavior betray your values,” he says, suggesting that her “bourgeois lifestyle” makes her a hypocrite. Nathalie retorts, “Why not outgrow these schemes? I think they’re sterile. Revolution is not my goal. It’s true. To help kids think for themselves.”

The issue for Hansen-Løve seems to be not whether one lives a life consonant with theoretical political belief, but whether one lives a life that satisfies the demands of ones own sense of self. The quest is internal.

For Nathalie, the compensation for loss of husband to another woman and her mother to death is freedom, most importantly freedom of the mind. Shortly after her encounter with Fabien, she reads her class a quote from Rousseau:

So long as we desire, we can do without happiness. We expect to achieve it. If happiness fails to come, hope persists. And illusion’s charm lasts as long as the passion causing it. Thus, this condition suffices to itself, and the anxiety it inflicts is a pleasure which supplants reality, perhaps bettering it. Woe to him who has nothing to desire! He loses everything he owns. We enjoy less what we obtain than what we desire, and are happy only before becoming so.

Nathalie continues: “This is the power of imagination. It compensates for the absence of the loved one with a pleasure that is purely mental, unreal in a way, yet nevertheless effective. For people with a lot of imagination, like Julie but probably Rousseau as well, phantasmagorical satisfaction is a real comfort that supplants, replaces carnal pleasure.”

The importance of individual responsibility and self-definition undergird the emotions at play in these three films. The morality involved in choosing well extends not only to romantic love, but to the family and to the choice of vocation. Divorce and death may challenge us, but, if thoughtfully structured, we can persist with purpose.

As Lorenz ruminates to Camille, “Life is never what you expect. Your fantasy-version of the world is doomed to failure. It’s up to you to create one that’s deeper, more real. That’s how you become yourself.”

In pursuit of purpose, fidelity to ones own guiding light is primary; infidelity to another may be necessary to fully understand oneself and, in Hansen-Løve’s universe, is less a stressor than a signal.

In “Things …,” when Nathalie’s husband tells her he has met someone else, her strongest feeling seems to be not hurt, but displeasure that he should make her aware of this other person. In “Goodbye…,” Camille (played by Lola Creton), tempted to return to Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) after a long separation, tests her resurgent feelings by sleeping with him again, hiding this new affair from her then husband, the older Lorenz (Magne Håvard-Brekke).

Because of this unfaithfulness, Sullivan himself chastises her as no longer “pure,” but in the French universe of Hansen-Løve, honesty with oneself is the ultimate good, and this exploration is what Camille requires in order to understand her ultimate choice.

Rarely does one find a film that seamlessly weaves laugh out loud humor, sly meta- elements and heartfelt emotion into one production. This is one such film.

Miranda July, the director as well as one of the leads, is apparently a creative inferno. She directs, acts, writes (a novel, and two collections of short stories), does performance art, sings. I was not surprised to find that she has spent time in Portland, Oregon, as this film has some of the sensibility of the Netflix series Portlandia, with all of its earnestness combined with self-satirizing glee.

It’s also rare to find a film where randomness works, not appearing studied or overreaching for effect. Here, quirkiness is clearly born from a genuinely eclectic and energetic mind, one which delights in finding no subject too small for examination, and which rewards the viewer with insight and humor at almost every turn.

After seeing The Future, I quickly followed up by watching her earlier film Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which also has many delightful moments, and which also stars July, but which is less of a tour de force than the later film. Both of these feature-length films are currently available on the Criterion Channel, which is also showing some of her shorter films.