Victoria (2015)

Run Laia Run: Laia Costa on the move in "Victoria"

By now, “Victoria,” the internationally acclaimed German film by director Sebastian Schipper, is more famous for its technical distinction than its functions as a movie. The film—a sprawling crime drama about a bank robbery involving three delinquent young men and a naïve woman—was shot in a single continuous take on the quiet, pre-dawn streets of central Berlin.

The movie opens, rather inauspiciously, in a crowded subterranean nightclub pounding away with thrumming techno music, gyrating bodies, and pulsating strobe lights so relentless and unwatchable that the resulting discomfort amounts to a visual flogging. Eye strain aside, this is where we meet the eponymous Victoria (Laia Costa), a new resident of Berlin by way of Madrid, Spain.

Victoria doesn’t have any friends in Germany and doesn’t speak the language, but before all is said and done, she’ll meet a disparate group of English-speaking male bandits—Boxer (Franz Rogowski), a bald hothead who used to be in prison; Blinker (Burak Yigit), a curly-haired rogue named after a turn signal; and Sonne (Frederick Lau), a sensitive fellow that Victoria falls for—and accompany them on a dizzying and dangerous adventure through the city. There’s a tense meeting with gangsters, a daring if unlikely bank robbery, and a frantic police chase and bloody shootout.

Of course, all of this is done in real time. Counting three false starts, the entire shoot of “Victoria” took two and a half hours, beginning late one night and ending just after sunrise. The script, reportedly only twelve pages long, consists of mostly improvised dialogue. It’s an ambitious piece of filmmaking that’s remarkable in that it was pulled off at all. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that the story isn’t very original, the characters aren’t especially interesting, and for all of its technical bravura, the blurry and often grainy visuals captured by cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen’s single, jittery hand-held camera just aren’t all that fun to look at.

It doesn’t help that “Victoria” takes forever to get going, padding its thin plot with a lot of superfluous filler. The first hour or so consists of extended scenes of the characters mind-numbing peregrinations around Berlin in the wee hours—robbing a convenient store, goofing around on the street, arguing at a café where Veronica works (apparently, she never sleeps). The movie plods on for 138 minutes, even though a more thoughtfully planned 98 would have been plenty.

“Birdman” is another prominent, recent example of the single take movie. Its director, Alejandro Iñárritu, memorably defended the approach saying, “We live our lives with no editing.” True enough. But in the case of “Victoria,” while spending time with drunk, derelict twenty-somethings can be fun for a short time, a little goes a long way.