Notorious V.I.C.
Victoria / directed by Sebastian Schipper
Victoria kicks off with an image of liberation and youth: the eponymous heroine (Laia Costa) dances alone amid the industrial bass beats and strobing lights of a 4 a.m. Berlin nightclub. She seems happy, but also somehow out of place: she apparently doesn’t speak German, and you have to wonder why she’s dancing by herself. A young German man starts to flirt with her; their paths cross again as she is leaving. The man, Sonne (Frederick Lau), and Victoria engage in a light, flirtatious banter; the conversation interweaves into interactions with Sonne’s three friends. Fairly inebriated, the four men collectively form a wild bundle of male energy, boisterous, friendly, competitive, and aggressive. They try to persuade Victoria to take a ride with them in a car, which turns out not to be theirs at all, as an aggrieved owner soon makes clear in off-screen shouting. Victoria seems amused rather than worried by their amateurish efforts, and gives in to their entreaties to join them as they carouse through the pre-dawn streets in drunken camaraderie. The latent aggression is suddenly loosed as Sonne’s hyper friend Boxer gets into a shoving match with a pair of random passersby, but it’s just as suddenly gone, like a squall blown through to clear skies. The men persuade Victoria to accompany them to a rooftop, where they continue their partying.
So for its first third or so, Victoria plays out like an alternative diabolical version of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise: characters talk and walk around a German-speaking city, gradually establishing intimacy, with romance in the air -- but all while, the threat of gang rape hangs over the proceedings. It’s impossible to watch these early scenes without worrying that something is going to go terribly wrong - Sonne seems nice enough, but I doubt there’s a viewer who doesn’t wonder if this evening is going to end with sexual violence against Victoria. The scenes carry a twisted charge: tense with a vague premonition of danger, yet clearly liberating for Victoria, who seems charmed and happy to finally be meeting people after months of friendlessness in her new city. The spontaneity of their interactions sharpens the tension: you have a sense that literally anything can happen.
At some level, as Victoria’s trust of the young men appears vindicated, the viewer in turn comes to trust Victoria’s judgment, which was never as sharp or cynical as our own; and in doing so, we identify more fully with her perspective on what transpires around her. This identification is all the stronger due to the film’s striking conception - it was all filmed in a single, amazing two-plus hours take that more or less tells the entire story from Victoria’s perspective. Whether you’re fully aware of the technique or not as it’s happening, it immerses you in Victoria’s world. By the end, the action feels both perfectly spontaneous and perfectly fated, as if all these random interactions could only have ended up the way they did. The camera seems to witness a story that unfolds, but also conjures or constructs it, a seeming paradox that may be central to the film’s dreamlike feel. The approach also underlies the film’s profound tension: something important must be on the horizon, why else would the camera stay so loyal to Victoria? It’s like a variation on an omniscient point of view - we aren’t shown everything, but are shown the one person around whom the central events will transpire.
There’s a beautiful pivot at the halfway point or so, where Victoria’s experience of the evening becomes more classically romantic, and also revealing of her character and motivations in a way that’s persuasive, deeply sympathetic, and quietly devastating. It may be a little too pat a revelation, but on the other hand, it involves a display of amazing musical abilities; it helps that much goes unspoken, and even Sonne’s difficulty in articulating his reaction (complicated by the limited English in which he and Victoria communicate) adds to the power of the scene. It seems possible that Victoria and Sonne may have a link that goes beyond the random camaraderie of a beer-fueled evening, even as she’s revealed how it might be hard for her to make such connections.
If Victoria’s first half explores how people begin to trust each other and form bonds of intimacy, the second half is a roller-coaster concatenation of increasingly bad choices cascading into utter disaster and tragedy. A map of the film’s tension would be shaped like an hourglass; after the reprieve of the center, it begins to mount again, inexorably, ridiculously. When the camera picks up Victoria’s near-hyperventilation at a couple points, it feels like she could be channeling the parallel breathing of any sweaty-palmed viewer. Indeed, it’s as if she experiences a lifetime’s range of emotions in the film’s short time frame: the tremors of love, the depths of despair, the ecstasy of victory, the sorrow of loss. Beyond this, the second half is an amazing depiction of collectively experienced extreme emotions - panic, relief, fear - that I haven’t seen pulled off in quite this way before. Victoria remains the center of our attentions, but with her we are drawn into extreme group emotional dynamics. And by the end, we’re left with a highly specific experience that raises familiar, basic questions in refreshing ways. Why did the events of the night unfold like they did? Was Victoria’s character her fate? Is there any way she could have done things differently? And why has this happened to her?
There’s room to nit and pick around this film. The cost of establishing a free, seemingly spontaneous feel, particularly in the first half of the film, is an occasional sense that things have dragged on a little too long; this particularly feels true as the initial tension begins to dissipate, and the drunken conversations ramble on without particular inherent interest. And there are times in the dramatic, action-fueled movement of the second half where, against the persuasive narrative of bad decisions fueled by limited choices and the pressure of circumstance, you might forgivably wonder about how very precisely badly everything is going - talk about no lucky breaks! But in its defense, I don’t think Victoria pretends to be a documentary or cinema verite - it’s aware of its action roots, and ultimately doesn’t shy away from pursuing its own take on genre conventions.