Victoria

Who doesn't love a long, unbroken shot? From a filmmaking perspective, you get to watch actors and crew working in synch for minutes at a time, pulling off lines and camera movements and blocking, choreographed like a huge dance. And from a plot perspective, it amps up the tension with an in-real-time feeling, and if the director is clever enough (like Welles' Touch Of Evil), uses the single take to misdirect. Victoria takes this idea one step further and does the whole movie as a single, unbroken take. Two hours and 10 minutes or so, one unbroken shot, following Victoria, an Italian immigrant recently moved to Berlin, as she meets up with some guys at a club and unwittingly gets involved in some shady underworld criminal events. I cannot go any further without commending this endeavor. From what I've read, the script was 12 pages long, with the vast majority of the dialogue improvised. That takes a lot of trust in the actors to push the story forward without a road map, and trust in the crew to capture everything that needs to be relayed to the viewer when most of it is being improvised. It is a marvel of filmmaking that they were able to pull it off. Unfortunately, technical achievement only gets a movie so far with me. I don't get distracted by jangling keys. I respect Victoria for what it accomplishes, for the cast never once flagging or losing energy, and for the crew to always be in the right place at the right time ... but that doesn't mean it's an entertaining movie, or that the gimmick doesn't cripple this movie's momentum. I want to touch on that second point first. Being one single two hour take is impressive, but it forces the movie to tell the story in real time. And that means it needs to FILL time. That is something Victoria can't keep up with. The meet-cute between Victoria and Sonne and his friends happens almost right away, and there's some flirtation between Victoria and Sonne, and this lasts an hour. An entire hour. For that hour, you get them wandering around Berlin, stealing from a bodega because the clerk is asleep, hanging out on a rooftop, walking around Berlin again, Victoria and Sonne going to the cafe she works at for opening procedures, and playing the piano in the cafe. All this takes SIXTY FUCKING MINUTES OF TIME. A meet-cute in a movie shouldn't take longer than an appearance in traffic court. It sure shouldn't take an hour, half the movie's run time, but because the inciting plot incident has a time element to it, they have to hit their time marks, which means stuffing this movie full of more padding than a 50 foot tall pillow. The gimmick of this movie strangles the momentum it could have with judicious editing. I know 1917 was edited to feel like a single take, but by having the appearance of one, it lent the journey some weight. This being an actual single take movie feels little more like a flex by the director. The meet-cute should've been 15-20 minutes, tops, and then boom, into the story, but nope, we've gotta indulge an artist here. And that brings us to the problem of entertainment. This movie is as exciting as cold pasta for the first half, and a bland heist-gone-wrong movie for the second. I'll give it credit for not doing what I thought it would -- some kind of sex crime or rape/revenge plot -- but I will take away that credit for committing the sin of Victoria being an absolutely terrible person. Her willingness to not only go along with the plan once she sees what it is, but what she does along the way when things go pear-shaped, turn Victoria from this sweet girl who gets swept up into a nightmare of organized crime and murder into someone who was just looking for an excuse to indulge her broken moral compass. Compare this to something like Emily The Criminal, which is about someone already down and broken, and the only way out is to go even further down; Emily is at least making her own choices, trying to take a shortcut to better herself and finding out it's a dead end road. Victoria here just meets these guys in a nightclub, has a couple beers with them, and decides that bank robbery and kidnapping are okay because she kinda likes one of the guys. It doesn't make sense at all, and since it doesn't make sense, it doesn't do much to entertain. It's not boring, it's just so ridiculous in execution, it's hard not to see the flaws in the design. Maybe I'm not the right audience for this movie. Maybe this is meant for the crowd that can ignore a weak story if there's a filmmaking gimmick behind it (The Neon Demon is a great example of this). I still think this is a movie worth checking out just for the technical achievement on display. But it comes with the warning that said technical achievement is also a shackle that keeps the movie from being what it could've been if the director was willing to be conventional and just use cuts.