Victoria

La forma triunfa sobre el contenido. Me quito el sombrero ante la creatividad y todos los preparativos que tuvieron que preceder a este rodaje para conseguir que todo se hiciera en una sola toma continua. Desgraciadamente, lo que hace que sabotea esta película es el comportamiento de los personajes, que toman las decisiones más estúpidas posibles en la película solo para dar al drama un lugar donde ir. Y dado que la película conecta al espectador con estos idiotas durante 140 minutos, uno siente intensamente tanto sus incomprensibles acciones como la duración innecesariamente excesiva. (27.10.2021)

140 minutos es mucho tiempo para un concepto de auténticas actividades nocturnas de unos pocos personajes en lugares cotidianos de Berlín. La primera mitad es un poco lenta debido a escenas y diálogos demasiado triviales. Pero es aún más sorprendente y absorbente si uno no se sabe nada de la trama. Los problemas llegan con insinuaciones, los sospechamos y tememos porque la protagonista no se los merece. Una «sola toma» muy hilarante, emotiva y minuciosamente tramada, con buenas interpretaciones. (28.08.2022)

En mi caso, en esta película había una alta presunción de que me gustaría. Laia Costa me cautivó en San Sebastián en Un amor Su encanto combinado con la Berlín nocturna no pudo decepcionar. Sin embargo, así fue. La mitad de la película consistía en charlas absurdas y además en inglés. La otra mitad mostraba una acción tonta y sin sentido. Tres estrellas aún son compasivas. (09.03.2024)

(BE2CAN, Lucerna) A very intensive experience, likeable characters, a high degree of credibility and form that leaves you flabbergasted. For me, by far the best of this year’s Be2Can: it wasn’t too brooding, didn’t have any snobbish answer to existential questions, it even had a plot! And it got an applause, wow! (18.10.2015)

Like Birdman, Victoria fails to convince us that the one-shot approach is anything more than a way to show off (the director likes to boast in interviews that, unlike Iñárritu, he didn’t use “invisible” digital editing and managed to get the whole film down on the third attempt with the actors after ten days of rehearsals). That said, it starts promisingly. Despite the seeming spontaneity, a clear plan and consideration for the viewer can be perceived behind the construction of the plot. All of the main characters are introduced to us during the lively prologue and we can easily remember them thanks to their nicknames. A clever safeguard against occasional slips of the tongue and hesitations is the fact that most of the characters don’t speak their native languages for a large part of the film, so they sometimes have to search for the right expression for a moment. On the roof, potential conflict is indicated by drawing attention to Boxer’s criminal past. In the café, the relationship between Victoria and Sonne is deepened through authentically intimate dialogue, legitimising the girl’s subsequent decision to join in the action to come. When the narrative begins to conform to familiar genre formulas, it loses steam and nearly all of its potential to somehow surprise us. One cliché follows another (the need to find a substitute accomplice, the engine failing to start, the gunshot wound not revealed until long after the impact), the absolute majority of scenes last longer than is necessary, the initially rather likable characters behave increasingly like idiots (which, from a certain moment should clearly be partially explained by the fact that they are under the influence of drugs), and the predictable ending is delayed by a number of unnecessary feints that in no way deepen the characters’ psychology or expand the film’s slight intellectual foundations. Despite the impressive technical execution (the cinematographer rightly gets priority over the director in the closing credits) and the skilful guidance of our attention by alternating between greater and lesser depth of focus, the film is not engaging enough to work as an example of intense “experiential” cinema, nor is it suitably rich in motifs or appropriately specific in the setting or characters (the protagonists barely have enough character traits for a two-and-a-half-hour film) to be taken as a statement about today’s multicultural Berlin or Generation Y. Victoria has bigger ambitions and a bigger budget, but in the end, it’s an admirable failure. (09.10.2015)