Undine: Christian Petzold’s Latest a Berlin Mermaid Tale Against the Current
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
Christian Petzold, now 60, is a leading figure of post-reunification German cinema, though his international breakthrough has really only been in the last decade.
That’s been the result of three engrossing period films that he wryly referred to as his “Love in the Times of Oppressive Systems Trilogy.” The first two — Barbara (2011) and Phoenix (2014) — featured his favourite star, the grave and compelling Nina Hoss. In 2019, Petzold released the meta-thriller Transit, an adaptation of a novel from pre-War Germany about people fleeing Nazi occupation of France, which was set, unnervingly, in contemporary times.
His latest Undine, which premiered at Berlin Film Festival more than a year ago, stars the two leads from Transit: Paula Beer — who shares some of Hoss’s troubled, enigmatic quality — and Franz Rogowski, who has an earthy innocence. No surprise that hopes were high but, the truth is, Undine feels like a bit of a stumble, even if it’s a balletic one.
Beer plays the title character Undine Wibeau, an historian with fiery red ringlets and chic suits, who lectures at the Berlin City Museum. She uses tabletop 3-D models to show Berlin in various stages of its turbulent evolution, from the 19th century through the Nazi era, the Cold War, and the new developments, including faux historical elements.
Early on, we come to understand that Undine is not someone who takes things lightly. We meet her sitting in an outdoor café, confronting her boyfriend Johannes (Jacob Matschenz), who has taken up with another woman. She tells him with calm certainty, “If you leave me, I’ll have to kill you. You know that.”
Undine says she has to go to work but will return in a half hour to finish their conversation. When she returns, Johannes has departed, and Undine tearfully wanders into a hotel. She is approached by a man, Christoph (Rogowski), who has just seen her lecture and wants to invite her out.
When she brushes him off, he steps back into a shelf, somehow causing an aquarium to fall forward and shatter, knocking both of them to the floor, leaving them drenched and surrounded by debris and gasping fish. Undine is lightly wounded with shards of glass, which Christoph plucks from her blood-flecked blouse. They are in love.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Appropriately for their damp introduction, Christoph works as an “industrial diver,” repairing turbines on the river floor. He lives in another town, and she travels by train to joins him on a dive. The movie, in a sense, slips under and into dreams, visions, supernatural events.
Petzold’s elliptical style, devoid of exposition, quickly spins into the hysteria of melodrama. An apparent murder, echoed by a drowning accident, a miraculous recovery, and more drowning. Getting your bearings is effectively impossible. The title offers some clues to the film’s more fantastical elements.
Most of us know 19th-century Danish author, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid. It was preceded by Petzold’s apparent source, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s 1811 novella, Undine, about a water nymph who falls in love with a mortal man, which allows her to gain a soul, but shortens her life.
As a kicker, if he abandons her, she will kill him and return to the water. Versions of the story of the water nymph and the mortal man have inspired not only the Disney film, but musical compositions, ballet, and movies from Ron Howard’s Splash to Neil Jordan’s Irish fairy tale, Ondine.
When Undine premiered at Berlinale last year, it won the international critics’ prize and a Silver Bear for Beer’s performance, for her double role as the sensible historian and passionate water spirit. Reviewers were understandably more qualified in their enthusiasm about the film as a whole.
Petzold is a filmmaker of seductive skill, who weaves a paranoid atmosphere with unsettling landscape shots, odd intimacy, and taut tension. One can see clear linkages between Undine to the nightmare weirdness of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, though it’s as if this similar story were drained of its passionate momentum and rendered abstract.
That means, in an academic sense, you can appreciate the audacious way Petzold has matched this fractured tragic fairy tale to the history of Berlin, a capital divided, re-attached, and then reanimated into a modern Franken-burg. It’s an audacious conceit, but not a persuasive or cathartic story.
Undine. Directed and written by Christian Petzold. Starring Paula Beer, Franz Rogowski, Maryam Zaree and Jacob Matschenz. Opens June 4 in cinemas where open and via virtual cinema.