Das Zimmer der Zauberinnen

Claude Miller, working this time in digital film, has made another superb study of a young woman under great pressure (mainly self-applied) who manages to work through her trauma. After the Charlotte Gainsbourg films of the 80's, and the wonderful L'Accompagnatrice with Romane Bohringer, he's looking at burnout in a thirty-year-old anthropology student who has a break down just days before the oral defence of her thesis. Claire is stubborn, sarcastic with everyone, and doubting her academic vocation.

In a hospital room with two other women, one of them a very disturbed elderly woman given to nocturnal wanderings that tie the staff in knots, she comes to understand something of herself, why she fights with her parents, why she's in a no-win relationship with a married man, why her studies of African myth and symbol are going nowhere. The digital camera in the cramped room is used very effectively to maintain a claustrophobic mood.

This film, the first of ARTE (French/German channel)"petite caméra" series, was shot with 2 miniDV DX100 Panasonic cameras. The kind of stuff you can buy at your local store. However, the quality of the picture matches what you could expect from a highly professional Digital Betacam. Very small, light, sensitive, the DV cams (the other films of the series were shot with Sony PD100 cameras) give new possibilities to the directors. At Berlin the film was presented in a 35mm copy. Nobody noticed the video origin. This demonstrates that it is now possible to produce non-Dogma high quality films with mini DV cameras.

"La Chambre Des Magiciennes" (2000) is more of a conceptual exercise than a full movie: Claude Miller wants to show us that he can make a movie that's about 80% set inside one hospital room. Well, he can, but he needed a stronger script; as it stands, the film is rather inconsequential. It never really finds what it wants to say. It also suffers from unattractive "Dogma 95" - style cinematography, a cinematic movement that came and left quickly and did not leave much pretty behind. Good performances from Anne Brochet, Annie Noël, and the gorgeous (though underused) Mathilde Seigner. ** out of 4.