Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria plays like a dream, in the most literal and figurative sense of the word. Shot in a continuous and wholly uninterrupted long take, the film spans 22 locations on the streets and rooftops of Berlin, capturing the shedding of sweat in a dance club, blood in a courtyard, and tears in its final moments with the kind of closeness and intimacy rarely seen in film.
Winner of the prestigious Silver Bear award at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival, Victoria is a work of theatrical cinema that is almost without a comparable peer.
The film follows Victoria (Laia Costa), a young Spanish exchange student living, for the moment, in Berlin. We first meet her in a throbbing, steam-filled, subterranean nightclub, surrounded by strobe lights and deafening music, as the camera slowly and gracefully follows her through a maze of stone and flesh.
After leaving the club for the deserted 3 a.m. city streets, she immediately finds the company of four young, drunk, German residents, who are out celebrating the release of their friend Boxer (Franz Rogowski) from prison. They offer to escort her to the café she’s responsible for opening in the morning and over the next hour and a half, we passively observe this charming group of misfits as they parade through the golden-lit city streets and climb atop far-reaching rooftops.
Quickly, Victoria’s attention is courted by the group’s charismatic leader Sonne (Frederick Lau), which eventually leads to an absolutely beautiful extended sequence in an empty café, where they both mournfully reflect on their sordid pasts and disappointments.
For much of the first half of the film, Victoria plays akin to an odd realist romance—however, it is soon after the calm that the storm swiftly arrives. Indebted to a gangster for protection money while incarcerated, the group agrees to rob a bank to make Boxer’s debt even to a local mob boss, though their getaway driver is drunkenly incapacitated. Naively assuming the role, Victoria agrees to act as the driver for their heist. It is at this moment the film quickly shifts gears.
For much of the extended heist sequence, you can’t help but watch the unfolding events with bated breath, wondering whether or not this is the moment it all goes south or allows them to get away. This superb tension is felt throughout the remainder of the film, and is due in large part to the groundwork laid in the first half.
The characters are not simply pieces on a board, but complex characters with genuine, believable emotions, due in large part to the superb acting by all involved, particularly Costa and Lau, who carry the film with incredibly intense and tender performances.
Victoria avoids merely devolving into a cinematic gimmick, and through its attention to character and emotion it becomes something more than stunt or spectacle. Not since Hitchcock has a crime film been this engaging and suspenseful, and never has tension been this palpably felt within an audience. Just watch it.
Victoria will be playing at the ByTowne Cinema from Nov. 13 to Dec. 9.
