Victoria (15.)
Directed by Sebastian Schipper.
Starring Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski, Burak Yigit and Max Mauff. Partly subtitled. 138 mins.
At the end of two and a quarter hours of film, the first name to appear in the credits is that of the cameraman. That's pretty unusual; in this case though it is well earned recognition for a very fine night's work by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen who spent the hours around dawn running through the streets of Berlin, sliding into cars, jumping into lifts, avoiding all reflective surfaces and shooting the whole film in one go.
138 minutes is a long time in the cinema but a comparatively short period of life. For Victoria (Costa) a Spanish girl living in Berlin it is enough to turn hers upside down. We first see her dancing alone in an underground nightclub, trying to make some connection with the barman, trapped by the language barrier (she doesn't speak German, just English.) As she leaves she gets talking with four local lads who seem like ne’er-do-wells. In the audience you are desperate for her to get away from these roughians, (she's like the horror movieie heroine doing something stupid) and are a bit affronted when she forms an attraction to Sonne (Lau.)
The film is about the possibilities of change, the fluidity of identity and the desperation of loneliness. Going with the flow is an important concept in it, both in terms of what it is about and how to respond to it. Filming a whole film in one take can be dismissed as a gimmick, but there's no film without it: this story wouldn't be worth telling it, and it certainly wouldn't be believable. Over the course of two hours she will go from one place to somewhere quite different and the change would be ridiculous in most narratives but here both audience and protagonist are too caught up in events to notice. It's all about letting yourself go.
In many way the one take gimmick is just a refinement of the found footage gimmick that horror films have been milking for nearly two decades. If you don't like shaky cam (or have an aversion to sniffing: it's always coldest before the dawn) you won't like this film. It seems to me that hand held long takes rarely have the impact of those done on a crane or with Steadicam, or any instrument that makes the movement graceful and smooth. After a while the one take thing does slip your mind and only that story told in real time has any impact.
Victoria (15.)
Directed by Sebastian Schipper.
Starring Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski, Burak Yigit and Max Mauff. Partly subtitled. 138 mins.
At the end of two and a quarter hours of film, the first name to appear in the credits is that of the cameraman. That's pretty unusual; in this case though it is well earned recognition for a very fine night's work by Sturla Brandth Grøvlen who spent the hours around dawn running through the streets of Berlin, sliding into cars, jumping into lifts, avoiding all reflective surfaces and shooting the whole film in one go.
138 minutes is a long time in the cinema but a comparatively short period of life. For Victoria (Costa) a Spanish girl living in Berlin it is enough to turn hers upside down. We first see her dancing alone in an underground nightclub, trying to make some connection with the barman, trapped by the language barrier (she doesn't speak German, just English.) As she leaves she gets talking with four local lads who seem like ne’er-do-wells. In the audience you are desperate for her to get away from these roughians, (she's like the horror movieie heroine doing something stupid) and are a bit affronted when she forms an attraction to Sonne (Lau.)
The film is about the possibilities of change, the fluidity of identity and the desperation of loneliness. Going with the flow is an important concept in it, both in terms of what it is about and how to respond to it. Filming a whole film in one take can be dismissed as a gimmick, but there's no film without it: this story wouldn't be worth telling it, and it certainly wouldn't be believable. Over the course of two hours she will go from one place to somewhere quite different and the change would be ridiculous in most narratives but here both audience and protagonist are too caught up in events to notice. It's all about letting yourself go.
In many way the one take gimmick is just a refinement of the found footage gimmick that horror films have been milking for nearly two decades. If you don't like shaky cam (or have an aversion to sniffing: it's always coldest before the dawn) you won't like this film. It seems to me that hand held long takes rarely have the impact of those done on a crane or with Steadicam, or any instrument that makes the movement graceful and smooth. After a while the one take thing does slip your mind and only that story told in real time has any impact.
