Victoria’s Last Year in Rogowski-bad, Weekly Reel #59
A take on the one-take, a limp deflator (we’ve all been there), and “art.”
News of the Week: sorry for the delay in posts, I’ve done my Euro-summer travel requirements and am now back in the chair.
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Victoria (2015, Sebastian Schipper, Germany) is another ‘one-shot film,’ but what sets it apart is that it’s actually a one-shot film, meaning that the entire film was filmed in one go. No clever stitching to give the stage-illusion (Rope; but to be fair, filming with film versus digital requires it) or epic (Birdman and 1917) the chance to change settings and costumes and foundation touch-ups. Like with Russian Ark, also filmed three times to get it right (but Victoria films for an extra thirty minutes plus to set the narrative record), Victoria is a craft achievement that forces the story to work harder than usual to justify its existence. Otherwise, it falls into the Kael-bust camp of technical overachievers that fail to convey a story. Victoria’s director Sebastian Schipper had this in mind on the press circuit (the film “polarized” Berlinale during its 2015 premiere, presumably because of the ‘gimmick’ critique):
Craft is nothing at all. Here, too, it's like in music: music doesn't mean hitting the right note. Music means making music. Otherwise you could create it synthetically…I have to be my own idiot and maybe endure that I'm not as good as Spielberg or Coppola. Jaws and Apocalypse Now can still be watched. But you couldn't make those films today the way you did back then - it would turn into a folklore event. It's like that art forger Beltracchi: he's obviously very talented in his craft and can paint like the greats. But is he an artist? (My translation.) [Can you hear the music?]
Victoria is a street play that opens in the most Berlin way possible: 4 A.M. at an underground Kreuzberg club full of techno-strobes, techno-strobes, techno-bros, techno-… Victoria (Laia Costa) is a young Spanish lady enjoying the Berlin nightlife, who clumsily asks if the blond bartender is Swedish before failing to cut the queue for a piss. She meets Sonne (Frederick Lau) at the entrance/exit, who offers to show her a true Berliner night with his buddies, Boxer (Franz Rogowski as an American History X extra), Blinker (Burak Yigit), and Fuß (Max Mauff; note to Americans: ß is a double ‘s’). Their broken English convinces Victoria to spend more time with them and they (what else?) go to a späti (note to Americans: a späti is an all-night liquor store that is the true engine of the Berlin economy). Sonne and Victoria lift several bottles, plus a pack of shaved-hazelnuts, from the sleeping attendant and continue their drunken street loitering (note to Americans: drinking in public is legal in Germany; just don’t be an asshole). They eventually make it to an apartment roof, where Victoria exhibits a degree of risk unseen in the other four, setting up events for later. Boxer explains his violent past in a rare moment of sincerity (also a setup), and then Victoria leaves, with Sonne riding her on her bike, back to her café a couple blocks away, which she must open in a few hours. She invites him inside, mumble drunken small talk, and she plays piano magnificently, explaining that she’s been practicing her whole life, but the conservatory didn’t think she was good enough. She tears up, but then Sonne gets a call from Boxer, whose reaction shifts the tone of the film into another mood that takes over the narrative and forces one to glue their attention to the succeeding events. And every time there’s a small break, one remembers the craft of how this all began, without breaks, at that humble club beginning.
Regarding the relations between the characters, which at first feels uncomfortably unknown, Victoria’s actions always makes one pause to wonder what her intentions are: is she interested in Sonne? Is she trying to experience a Berliner evening/early morning? Does she need to have any justification for her actions at all? These and other questions keep one engaged in the story as it turns from innocence to thriller tropes, which in the second and third acts tends to derail the sincerity of the first half. Costa as Victoria works well in that ambiguous role from drunken dancer turned heist accomplice. That uncertainty in her intentions and actions is more flexible than we’re led to expect, which helps propel the action forward. Lau as Sonne also makes this transition seem effortless, who’s constantly mediating between Victoria’s supposed innocence and Boxer’s shenanigans. Rogowski, who’s currently have a cinematic pump-up, plays Boxer with an intensity inherent to his acting abilities, which range from introverted newcomer (In the Aisles) to lead Petzold regular (Undine and Transit) and international player (A Hidden Life and Passages).
The biggest shout-out is to dp Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, Silver Bear Berlinale winner (who also beautifully shot Another Round) as well as the Canon EOS-C300. It’s unimaginable how someone could get all the angles and lighting and action and sightlines and emotions while making sure the crew is behind, the actors are in front, during the early morning hours of one of the busiest neighborhoods in Berlin. Though the one-take is a gimmick, one that I defend nonetheless, that calls attention to itself in a way that camerawork is supposed to avoid, it works with the thriller tropes here by turning you, the viewer, into an accomplice. We’re with Victoria and feel somewhat protective over her in the first half because of the unknown intentions of the guys. Then in the second half we’re ride or die with her. That wouldn’t have had as big of an impact with normal edits and camera work, and why not take the risk? Other (bigger) films will be the ones to blame for the one-take proliferation, if it were to happen, but Victoria and others bring an actual aesthetic and story to the gimmick that is sorely lacking elsewhere.
Save for Later
Passages (2023, Ira Sachs, France/Germany) was one of my most highly anticipated releases after its Sundance premiere, specifically because it stars three of the seven best Millennial European actors—Franz Rogowski, Ben Whishaw, Adèle Exarchopoulos—directed by a contemporary indie legend that Puritan U.S.A. deemed worthy of an NC-17 rating. What should have been a stamp of approval for this Franco-German production featuring bankable actors via MUBI turned into a limited release dribble that will be written off from an expanded release citing ‘rating’ reasons. But the real problem is that the story falls flat, it’s too small, and word of mouth, the lube of indie film marketing, will not be favorable. (Telling others you can peep Paddington Bear’s asshole, unfortunately, sadly, isn’t enough.)
In short, Passages is about a man (Rogowski) cheating on his husband (Whishaw) with a woman (Exarchopoulos), then flip flops between the two because of narcissistic indecision. Rogowski plays the man, Tomas, a film director, where the plot, chronologically and emotionally, follows the progression of his film from wrap to premiere. In the first scene, Tomas over-directs a simple downstairs walking action; he’s easily flustered, but it’s the end of the shoot so who isn’t, and now we’re suspicious of the artist who can’t properly express what he wants. Later, at the wrap party, while wearing a long-sleeve fishnet shirt and the kind of falcon-like fatigued countenance that only Rogowski can pull off, he’s jazzed and wants to dance with his husband, Martin, who doesn’t. Not sensing Martin’s long workday exhaustion, he dances with a woman, Agathe, a below the line worker on the film. Martin leaves, they dance, you’ve seen it in the trailer. They go back to Agathe’s apartment, decline to join her roommate’s Parisian balcony kick-back, and go into her sliding-door room.
The next morning Tomas returns to a frustrated Martin and frankly tells him that he slept with a woman and felt something genuine. Martin, surprisingly, is more understanding than most who’ve just been cheated on, wanting to give Tomas a little more freedom but also can’t help feeling betrayed. Tomas and Agathe meet again for a small work thing, then fuck again. Agathe, in the reverse but oddly similar position to Martin, feels the need to allow Tomas’s indiscretions to occur without the same reciprocity. And Tomas also doesn’t feel entirely sure what he should be doing. Like with the uncertainty surrounding the film’s pre-release lukewarm first preview but solid second preview, Tomas’s ego is unsure of itself and runs a high potential of ruining everyone else’s experience.
Like most filmmakers in the twenty-twenties, Sachs pivots towards some light auto-fiction. “Confessions of a film director” can replace the title or subtitle of most of these films. This sub-genre, which is a product of lockdown-era naval-gazing, reaches all filmmakers, high to low, commercial to experimental, but Sachs is one of the few to understand how it’s supposed to function as a story. Almost too well, which comes back around to be the film’s detriment. Sachs, known for his tight stories about the peculiarities of love and drama, sets the bar too low for himself when he regresses to the confines of a plot about a post-production director—perhaps itself a metaphor flagging his own late-stage directing career.
It’s apparent that this story is larger than it’s played out, which comes out in the performances. (Lesser known actors would’ve worked better for this stripped-down drama.) Rogowski, like Whishaw and Exarchopoulos, is too subdued for his own acting good. He can dial up the silent intensity levels to a level few others can reach, which Petzold and Victoria seems to have understood. Whishaw plays his typically sensitive yet strong main supporting character, just hornier. Exarchopoulos plays a typically horny yet down to earth main supporting character, just less sensitive. They’re fitting roles, not type-cast, but we’ve seen them before.
Pass
Last Year at Marienbad (1961, Alain Resnais, France/Italy) is bad, despite its magnificently gorgeous filming location (mainly Schloss Nymphenburg—a favorite of this writer; disclaimer: I could conceivably be having Wiesn envy symptoms that are manifesting in a film shot in Munich sixty years ago by the French), despite having Coco Chanel (her worst collaboration since in-bedding with the Nazis) design dresses for it, despite Karl Lagerfeld copying the film’s design for the Spring-Summer 2011 collection then coming back for Chanel’s Spring-Summer 2023 collection, despite the main actor’s appearance/manners resembling the legendary Louise Brooks, despite being one of Kurosawa’s favorite films, despite Terence Young styling the pre-credits sequence of From Russia with Love (this writer’s favorite Connery-Bond film) based on its aesthetics. A depthless 8½ “modernist” Left Bank panning shot featuring a “no-fun party with non-people” (Kael). Contours have never looked so boring. Who cares what happened last year in wherever or if that ever happened or what’s happening now there right now at the place, yes.
Screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet hoped to create the Nouveau Roman movement with this and other high profile films along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. If you haven’t heard of any of these people, then they didn’t do a great job in creating a unified artistic front, especially—who were they kidding—doing so at the same time as the Nouvelle Vague. Truffaut & Godard & Co. tolerated them only because they were not a threat: friends close, enemies in the spotlight. Resnais’s legacy is set in stone, and I don’t mean to re-ignite mid-century debates on how to craft “modernist” art in a world where the pill exists and man might go to the moon at decade’s end, but it’s precisely because history is cast that I’m able to criticize ‘what’s legendary may never die.’ Classics are either near perfect or wtf it this? Modern, or rather contemporary, films are muddled in the zeitgeist. What may appear like a classic now is cliché-blasé in ten years. The test of time. ‘All things must pass’ (GH). Films that are so-so in-the-now—for instance, my reaction to The Wolf of Wall Street after leaving the theater in 2013 versus me in 2023 ringing the DiCaps has the best acting performance of the twenty-tens bell—are still tempering and forming their shapes. Almost like time/opinion is the more important measure than opinion/time. The inflated values of the latter (look at IMDb or other aggregate sties of the best films ever—even Letterboxd, bless their heart, falls prey sometimes—even after their tampering) is the flashy tube man of used car dealerships. “I just want to feel this moment” as Aguilera said. Is there an emptier phrase than ‘in the moment.’ A momentary flux of serotonin. The pursuit of a fulfilling life rather than a happy life? Let’s ask others and see where it stands…
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