Vic­to­ria

With the rise in promi­nence of dig­i­tal video cam­eras, film­mak­ers can shoot any old shit and then build a movie in the edit­ing suite. Hit ​‘record’, let the actors prance about for a few hours in the hope of elic­it­ing at least a minute of gold, repeat to fade.

Back in the good-old-bad-old-days when film was a val­ued com­mod­i­ty and plan­ning was para­mount, you had to know exact­ly what you want­ed to do and say in advance. Film­mak­ing was a case of form­ing a cogent state­ment and then build­ing it as best you can. Now, we can just blurt out any­thing and as long as there’s a lens being point­ed in our gen­er­al direc­tion, and we’ve got our­selves some cinema.

Sebas­t­ian Schipper’s Vic­to­ria offers a mod­ern ode to that clas­si­cal form of film­mak­ing which ele­vat­ed cold, hard prepa­ra­tion to the lev­el of an art. The film was shot in a sin­gle con­tin­u­ous take between 4.30am and 7am on 27 April 2014 on the streets of Berlin’s south­west­ern hip­ster enclave of Kreuzberg. There are no invis­i­ble edits or fudges – every­thing you see hap­pens in real time. As with Ale­jan­dro González Iñárritu’s Bird­man, there is the faint whiff of gim­mick­ry to the enter­prise, but at least with Schipper’s film he gives the tan­ta­lis­ing impres­sion that the entire movie is always on the verge of falling to pieces. Bird­man had pro­duc­tion sheen, where this has true grit. By the end, its actors are pant­i­ng wrecks, entire­ly drained by this mad­cap undertaking.

Vic­to­ria (Laia Cos­ta) is our guide through a dis­tress­ing­ly event­ful pre-twi­light sor­tie in which care­free post-pub frol­ick­ing takes a sur­prise turn for the dead­ly. We meet her as she’s chug­ging back shots at an under­ground tech­no club and unsuc­cess­ful­ly attempt­ing to chat up the bar­man. Then, in that spe­cial way that only hap­pens when you’re half-cut on schnapps and stag­ger­ing through the streets with no place to go, she starts gab­bing with a small gang of young men and they become fast friends.

Though the men are pre­sent­ed as cheeky né’er-do-wells, Schip­per declines to pro­file them as arche­types straight away. For its open­ing hour, it gives us a bliss­ful­ly hon­est and free­wheel­ing por­tray­al of tip­sy cama­raderie, the likes of which are sel­dom cap­tured with such heady nos­tal­gia. Vic­to­ria is game to be part of their var­i­ous mon­keyshines, such as rob­bing booze from the doz­ing pro­pri­etor of an all-night gro­cer, or hol­ler­ing abuse at a pass­ing cop car. The mot­ley crew even spir­it her away to a rooftop hide­away on a grim tow­er block which offers a strik­ing panora­ma of the sleep­ing city.

Fred­er­ick Lau’s mouthy, puffy-eyed charmer Sonne leads the gang, clad in a scrag­gy track­suit top and with cig­a­rette con­stant­ly dan­gling from his bot­tom lip. The small ensem­ble attain a state of per­fect har­mo­ny in these ear­ly scenes, mak­ing their inter­ac­tions feel entire­ly nat­ur­al and the ensu­ing fris­son of romance whol­ly plau­si­ble. As Vic­to­ria and Sonne start to coy­ly flirt, it’s incred­i­ble how Schip­per presents two char­ac­ters who are clear­ly besot­ted with one anoth­er, though each refus­es to let down their guard lest they anni­hi­late the sense of fun dic­tat­ed by the occasion.

These scenes are so charged with eupho­ria and joy that it comes as some­thing of a dis­ap­point­ment when they come to an end and the seri­ous sec­ond act kicks in. All this was a slow­burn set-up for anoth­er, more gener­ic plot­line, as Victoria’s devo­tion is test­ed when she’s pulled in to help the guys with an urgent crim­i­nal endeav­our. This sec­tion of the film is more impres­sive on a cold tech­ni­cal lev­el, dis­pens­ing with much of the messy human­i­ty of the open­ing sal­vo. Where Sonne was once a chancer with a twin­kle in his eye, he’s now a whiny sad-sack who – hav­ing known her for just over an hour – is com­fort­able allow­ing Vic­to­ria to risk her life to help them save theirs.

Logis­ti­cal­ly stag­ger­ing though it is, Vic­to­ria is half a great film and half an okay but sil­ly film. The sin­gle take strat­e­gy makes total sense, and it does man­age to super­charge the sim­ple mate­r­i­al with­out draw­ing too much undue atten­tion to itself. But with its sto­ry being split so clean­ly in half, it’s hard to deci­pher what – if any­thing – the film is try­ing to say. Vic­to­ria her­self works in a café hav­ing depart­ed from her dream of becom­ing a piano vir­tu­oso, and maybe the film has an under­ly­ing con­ser­v­a­tive streak where it says that none of this would’ve hap­pened if she had been more dis­cern­ing and less impul­sive. At 138 min­utes it also out­stays its wel­come by a good 30 min­utes, but there are good stretch­es of this film which touch on the sublime.