Victoria (2015)

Victoria, directed by Sebastian Schipper, is a bit of an under the radar kind of film for me and I noticed it in trailers (well-made trailers do pique my interest as they are so rare) rather than hearing about it although it was released last year in Germany to very strong reviews. 

Some of those reviews have to be due to the technical achievement of making a film with one take. The first time I remember watching a one-take film was the remarkable Timecode^[1] by Mike Figgis which was simultaneously disorientating and impressive. 

The single take technicality is what drew me in, but the question has to be asked over what it actually achieves - there has to be a purpose to the long takes and I have mentioned them before in both River and Gravity reviews and what they achieve there. Victoria has to be a little different as it is the whole film which is done like that which means that the "breather" from the end of the single take is not there until the credits roll at the end. The breathers are still created within the pacing by including small sections in lifts and with changes in audio (the soundtrack is created by Nils Frahm) so I have to say that it is not just a showy gimmick. The atmosphere is quite well created and the way that the characters are rounded off and explained within the "set-up" phase of the heist is really neat, yet natural.

Obviously, with a heist style film, the plot is largely fixed into the genre and the main elements are the set up and the pay off. In this case, the Spanish protagonist, Victoria, is somebody that gets caught up in the partying of four men semi-celebrating a birthday. Victoria has recently moved to Germany and this is a single night in Berlin - and where it could take you. These German men are interesting to her, and she to them, and she joins in with their fun for reasons of loneliness (even though she has work in the morning). The men are "real Berliners" and they entice Victoria with tales of a real Berlin^[2] away from the tourist trap clubs (that they cannot afford to get into) which basically means drinking out on the streets and on a rooftop that these friends have commandeered. The chat up lines are both lame and quite sweet, and they work even though they are obvious lies - Victoria is keen to join in and, to the audience, this seems ridiculously risky. What are you expecting to happen in a film to a girl being chased by four drunk men?

With the characters created, the next step is to give them motivation, and this is again done quite neatly with a few jokes and drunken chats so that you know enough about them all to understand their roles. Further exposition is provided for the main character, Victoria, as she plays an astonishing piece of music on the piano which silences her audience (Mephisto Waltz No 1). This scene is excellently done with a nice mixture of tension and explanation providing a little insight as to why she is in Berlin at all and why she may be a little eager to try new things.

Once the heist starts, the characters, of which there are only the five main ones, are all established and the journey of that heist - from practice dry-run to the real thing and its aftermath plays out for the remainder of the film. With this being done in real-time, it is a pretty intense ride through Berlin's early morning.

As the nature of the film is to follow one character - Victoria - it is a massively important role for the film and her ability is integral to whether the film works at all. The actress that makes this all work is the genuinely brilliant Laia Costa who is able to carry this film on her shoulders and is in every part of this film. She lends the film an impish naivety which takes us through the exposition and set-up effortlessly and then brings believable changes to her character later on. Although this is a German film, the language is not exclusively German and there is a European element to it with Victoria herself unable to speak German as she is from Madrid. As a result, much of the film is in English^[3] and this means that most of the characters converse with Victoria in broken English or with a slightly stuttering delivery which is a very interesting directorial choice. Even so, the delivery is superb and believable throughout (maybe the second language can cover up some problems with forgetting lines) which is the important thing.

Whilst I would not say Victoria is presently my favourite thing called Victoria, I think I would recommend watching it as it is so live and technically impressive. The whole idea of a journey through a night following someone is expertly realised here and that heist gone awry is treated with a freshness that is sorely lacking from most films. As a result, I would recommend this film to anyone interested in the heist genre and technical film-making. And also anyone that likes good films. That includes you (there are not even that many subtitles to read!).

Here is a trailer:

I watched this at the ever reliable Barbican - you could too. Or you could try the new business model for niche films of streaming at home via Curzon. You could also just not watch it, but that is not a course of action I'd recommend. 

^{1. In that case, the single take feature was not the only technically impressive element as it was also 4 separate single takes all shown together in the corners of the screen. This would still rank as the single most difficult and disorientating experience of watching a film that I've ever had - I spent the first 30 minutes or so working out how to watch the film.↩}

^{2. One of the joys of watching films set in London is seeing how unfamiliar and unrepresentative that familar places can be made with judiciously placed lights and careful framing. This may also be the case with Berlin but as the film was shot live there, it is surely quite accurate - at least in the exterior shots. I am very fond of Berlin as a city and the film is set in a fairly central part but not particularly near (or found in shot) any of the more blockbuster sights. Nonetheless, it was still pleasing to see places that I'd walked to and seen myself although it may not always have been an accurate memory of mine.↩}

^{3. The amount of spoken English is said to have precluded the film from being eligible for inclusion as a foreign language film in the Oscars.↩}

Goodbye Lenin (2003)

Ostalgie is nice word, which I'd imagine is a portmanteau^[1] of nostalgia and ost (east), which represents some of the warmth many feel towards the East German times. I remember coming across it when I went to Berlin for the first (and, presently, only) time which was embodied by the Ampelmann^[2]. phenomenon.

Good Bye Lenin falls into the category of ostalgie with its relatively warm depiction of the 1980s. Following a young man, Alex (played by Daniel Brühl, seen recently in Rush), through his memories of childhood, initially, there is a sepia tinge that is almost inherent with the voiceover and music bed. The basic theme of the story is directly about nostalgia as the story revolves around the recreation of the east for a single person - his mother.

As the world hurtled into the 1990s, unknown to many on the red side of the world, communism was close to its end. When the wall fell in Berlin, it set in motion a quite breathtakingly quick reunification process and that does not always take everyone with it... A few days before the change of the world, the main character's mother, Christiane (played by Katrin Saß) has a heart attack and falls into a coma. She does wake but, eight months later, there have been some major changes and the shock of that could be enough to spark another heart attack. Alex decides that she, although bedridden, should be brought home so that she does not discover the change and so recreates the very recent past in a single room. Once the setup is complete, it is a fairly simple romp through until the eventual discovery. It is fairly predictable but, at the same time, is so charmingly put together that you don't step out of the film and worry about predicting it. There are some other elements to the film but it is essentially all through that prism of unification.

I've not seen a huge number of German films so I was not always sure how the whole thing would work out, and whether there is a different narrative style to take in, I don't know if this is particularly typical either. There is an element of darkness in some of the humour but I'd say it was a fairly straightforward comedy. The premise is quite enjoyable and also quite interesting as it shows how quickly the change was made to happen for the people in the East with a huge cultural shift^[3]. Within a few months, the cityscape was so different that it was a large project to hide it from her - and I think the film really made me sit and wonder about that change. An amazing upheaval and it shows that it was not all good for the inhabitants. After 40 years within a given system, many in the East really lost out and the little vignettes of the older people wistfully thinking of the past are quite touching. There are some scenes where Alex persuades some other people (with capitalist cash, of course) to play along with his mother and they come and sing socialist songs for her and join in the party. Another friend goes to the trouble of mocking up news broadcasts to explain random Coca-Cola signs that have been spotted.

Apart from being a good film in its own right, there are also some great touches and nods to the differences between East and West Berlin that I found satisfying. If you think that aspect of it would be enjoyable, I can definitely recommend it but even without that, it is still a pleasant way to spend a few hours of your life.

^{1. This means words that are made up of others, my favourite is the cross-cultural word karaoke which means empty (kara - also used in karate) orchestra (oke) which is now an English word though it is from Japanese. The reason I like it is because "oke" is directly from the English word orchestra so it is a loan word returned back, with interest, to form the portmanteau.↩}

^{2. This is the symbol that was used in the traffic lights in the DDR which has gained cult status. You can see more about it here [link].↩}

^{3. There are some real question marks, even now, as to how deep that divide was and there are still massive differences between the east and west. This should be expected, of course, but it is fairly stark as reported in recent elections [link].↩}