In Christian Petzold’s “Undine”, a legendary figure and an industrial diver fall in love: they fidget between dry culture theory and slippery romance – and yet bring a sigh.
Love as a radical act: Hollywood shares this idea with contemporary cultural discourses. The Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz states in books and interviews that contemporary people are inhibited from binding, the price of which is chronic loneliness. The Slovenian thinker Dervish Slavoj Žižek, however, is happy to use the English phrase “falling in love” to indicate the harrowing eventfulness of “true”, authentic love that untangles every system of order. Just like the “love at first sight”, which has become a kitsch symbol and is known from many film novels. Two strangers graze and are struck by lightning. Suddenly, getting together is a top priority, everything else doesn’t matter anymore, under the pressure of great emotions, private and social resistances burst like rotten wood.
Mythical and prose
Whereby: In such a pure form, love is no longer seen so often in the cinema. A “love explosion” is most likely to be granted to young people. When it comes to adults, the process of becoming a couple is presented primarily as a gradual, sometimes rather tedious process, in the course of which all possible obstacles are overcome, concerns are eliminated and complexes are shaken off. It’s almost a miracle that film characters still come together under these circumstances. This can be seen as a maturation of the genre: realism instead of romantic transfiguration! Or interpret it as a fear of unfiltered emotions that confirms the theses mentioned at the beginning.
“Undine”, the most recent work by the renowned German author-filmmaker Christian Petzold, is deliberate and unabashedly going the opposite way – his lovebirds are on fire from the spot. Love as an outbreak, literally: the first time the heroine (Paula Beer) and Christoph (Franz Rogowski) meet, an aquarium trembles and bursts, they are sloshed away, happy and soaked, they lie on the ground and look deep into each other’s eyes. A clear announcement. Just like the one that Undine had just knocked down on her ex in front of the bib: “You can’t go. If you leave me, I have to kill you. ”She means dead serious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJq0nVtAOks
So is the protagonist the legendary water spirit that charms frivolous youngsters and plunges into ruin? Maybe. Mythical and prose, real and unreal often flow together in Petzold. For example in “Yella”, where Nina Hoss walks through the investment industry like a ghost. Or in “Transit”, which puts Anna Seghers’ World War II novel into an indefinite future that smells suspiciously of the present. So Undine is actually a magical being. But also a historian who gives tourists well-formulated lectures about the Berlin Humboldt Forum.
It is these lectures that captivate Christoph under Undine’s spell. Later, in one of the most beautiful scenes, he even wants to hear her in bed. But the industrial diver, who is amazed under water at giant catfish – yet another Petzoldian poeticization of the banal – loves everything about his beloved anyway. Rogowski, still a silent film noir hero in “Transit”, looks like a crushed schoolboy here, his characteristic lisp sounds unusually delighted. Even Beer, who might call evil tongues a surrogate for Petzold’s long-time regular actress Nina Hoss, charms with a loose-fitting smile despite a certain brittleness. Even the aesthetics have butterflies in their belly: No Petzold work has ever shone in such warm colors.
Languish, sigh! But where is the drama? First in the background. Then it emerges creepingly, meanders around the lovers along a melancholic piano motif. The film leaves it unclear exactly why Undine has to live up to her name, even though she doesn’t want it. Only that it could have something to do with precarization and with the aura of anachronistic representative buildings (the architectural expertise of the main character is not an interchangeable plot decoration).
This Petzold-typical link between cultural theory and genre film practice, concrete social realities and utopian fantasy does not really succeed. This time the intellectual superstructure remains too abstract. But the attempt to plant a genuine love story right in the middle of the economically timed German conditions is pleasant, in any case. Not least because of the unusual courage to be slippery – and humorous details. When Christoph Undine resuscitated after a diving accident, he did so in the rhythm of the long-running disco “Stayin ‘Alive”. To survive in difficult times, that’s what love is about.
Just like responsibility. And the possible consequences of their disdain. What usually neither spongy noses nor delicate relationship portraits put into the picture. The majority of them leave their couple at the moment of harmony. It will fit! Or maybe not. In any case, “Undine” takes the concept of responsibility seriously. And interprets feminist, which is often interpreted conservatively. This is also a little magic. Splash.
(“Die Presse”, print edition, June 29, 2020)
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