Undine

Has there ever been a film in which a woman who also hap­pens to be a hybrid water sprite gets real­ly narked off when her boss bul­lies her into pick­ing up some shift work for an absent colleague?

In the trans­fix­ing lat­est from Ger­man film­mak­er Chris­t­ian Pet­zold, mythol­o­gy and mun­dan­i­ty coex­ist in a drab con­tem­po­rary Berlin as Paula Beer’s coy­ly mys­te­ri­ous Undine meets very cute with Franz Rogowski’s guile­less roman­tic Christophe and a whirl­wind love affair plays out both above and below the water line. As with his pre­vi­ous film Tran­sit, which fused togeth­er the trap­pings of a swoon­ing wartime thriller and an urgent chron­i­cle of Euro­pean refugees in flight, Undine is a film which asks you to see things with­out show­ing them to you.

Rather than trow­el on the cheapo CGI or, con­verse­ly, over-empha­sise the story’s pro­sa­ic back­drop, Pet­zold sim­ply tells his sto­ry and states his intel­lec­tu­al objec­tives by allow­ing mul­ti­ple realms of fan­ta­sy and real­i­ty to hap­pi­ly coex­ist at once. Undine her­self is intro­duced at a café where her boyfriend Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) threat­ens to leave her. If he does, she says she will be forced to kill him, a vio­lent threat which bare­ly registers.

When not hav­ing to be roman­ti­cal­ly com­pul­sive as a mode of sur­vival, Undine works as a lec­tur­er for the city’s Depart­ment of Urban Plan­ning, and there’s the ele­ment of a siren’s call to her lugubri­ous­ly intoned ora­tions about the sto­ried evo­lu­tion of Berlin’s munic­i­pal sprawl.

Christophe hap­pens to catch one of these talks, and lat­er bumps into Undine at the café́ where Johannes gave her the heave-ho. A strange acci­dent leads the pair to be swad­dled in each other’s arms and soaked to the bone, a cheek­i­ly con­trived qua­si-erot­ic set-piece that again offers a gaudy flash­ing sign­post to Petzold’s earnest affec­tion for clas­si­cal melodrama.

An intense courtship leads to the dis­cov­ery that Christophe also hap­pens to be an indus­tri­al div­er, and with this handy occu­pa­tion­al over­lap, Undine feels she may have met her soul mate. The feel­ing from the lov­ably unre­con­struct­ed and impul­sive Christophe is most def­i­nite­ly mutu­al. It’s hard to know exact­ly what to make of a film whose pet­ty eccen­tric­i­ties serve to gen­tly dis­tort the dynam­ics of what always seems to come across as a hot-blood­ed if eeri­ly con­ven­tion­al human drama.

The point being made is that love forms an impreg­nable ring fence around such rela­tion­ship sta­ples as jeal­ousy and inse­cu­ri­ty, where not even the fan­tas­ti­cal cir­cum­stances can com­pli­cate these pri­mal urges. Both Beer and Rogows­ki com­mit to play­ing things com­plete­ly down the line, allow­ing instinc­tu­al desires to lead them rather than open­ly expos­ing (and milk­ing) anx­i­eties about Undine’s identity.

There are many great film­mak­ers who are able to work mag­ic with a low bud­get, but Pet­zold is sure­ly one of great ​‘less-is-more’ mae­stros on the scene. He is some­how able to chan­nel the ornate, oth­er­world­ly roman­ti­cism of some­one like Jean Cocteau with­out even a lick of make up or inno­v­a­tive cam­era trick­ery. There are twists and turns to this tale, but as with the major­i­ty of Petzold’s films, the nar­ra­tive takes a back­seat to the charge of ungovern­able and ummutable passions.