Victoria (2015)
Country: GER
Technical: col/2.35:1 138m
Director: Sebastian Schipper
Cast: Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski
Synopsis:
A Spanish former conservatoire student in Berlin takes up with a quartet of drunken ne'er-do-wells and, in a fit of self-destructive pique, throws in her lot with theirs when they are coerced into performing a bank heist.
Review:
Schipper's one-take wonder never quite rises above its ambitious underpinnings: like Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, it casts its audience into a subterranean world of vice in which anything might happen, and bids us accept its premises thanks to the persuasiveness of a formal flourish. Not so easy, when its heroine commits a succession of capricious blunders, any one of which would, one might think, have been the object of some cautionary remonstrance on the part of her Hispanic mother... There is some justification for taking the film as a portrait of the disenchanted lives of many of our young folk in this century, or simply of what it is to be a young European, and some scenes undoubtedly make us catch our breath, but it's a long night's journey into day, with improvised performances at times desperately in need of an editor's scissors.
Country: GER
Technical: col/2.35:1 138m
Director: Sebastian Schipper
Cast: Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski
Synopsis:
A Spanish former conservatoire student in Berlin takes up with a quartet of drunken ne'er-do-wells and, in a fit of self-destructive pique, throws in her lot with theirs when they are coerced into performing a bank heist.
Review:
Schipper's one-take wonder never quite rises above its ambitious underpinnings: like Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, it casts its audience into a subterranean world of vice in which anything might happen, and bids us accept its premises thanks to the persuasiveness of a formal flourish. Not so easy, when its heroine commits a succession of capricious blunders, any one of which would, one might think, have been the object of some cautionary remonstrance on the part of her Hispanic mother... There is some justification for taking the film as a portrait of the disenchanted lives of many of our young folk in this century, or simply of what it is to be a young European, and some scenes undoubtedly make us catch our breath, but it's a long night's journey into day, with improvised performances at times desperately in need of an editor's scissors.
Country: GER
Technical: col/2.35:1 138m
Director: Sebastian Schipper
Cast: Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski
Synopsis:
A Spanish former conservatoire student in Berlin takes up with a quartet of drunken ne'er-do-wells and, in a fit of self-destructive pique, throws in her lot with theirs when they are coerced into performing a bank heist.
Review:
Schipper's one-take wonder never quite rises above its ambitious underpinnings: like Gaspar Noé's Irreversible, it casts its audience into a subterranean world of vice in which anything might happen, and bids us accept its premises thanks to the persuasiveness of a formal flourish. Not so easy, when its heroine commits a succession of capricious blunders, any one of which would, one might think, have been the object of some cautionary remonstrance on the part of her Hispanic mother... There is some justification for taking the film as a portrait of the disenchanted lives of many of our young folk in this century, or simply of what it is to be a young European, and some scenes undoubtedly make us catch our breath, but it's a long night's journey into day, with improvised performances at times desperately in need of an editor's scissors.