Malina

Malina is incredibly complex drama on the nature of insanity and to watch it, especially in the beginning, is quite a labour. A woman believes that she is a writer and all her men are fruits of her ill consciousness or personages of her unwritten book or alter egos of her split imagination. And episode after episode her consciousness keeps deteriorating more and more but the end breaks everything once again so all that was happening comes up in absolutely different light and changes its meaning. Malina is an anagram of 'animal' and it isn't accidental but symbolic to the entire surrealistic content of the film. Malina is unique and utterly fabulous movie having many layers of narration and visualization.

Isabelle Huppert as an actress give the brilliant performance in this movie. And she's the only reason to see this totally nonsense movie. Sorry, but don't waist your time.

German director Werner Shroeter unfortunately never became as well known as other directors of his generation and origin (Fassbinder, Wenders, Herzog). I had the chance to discover him years ago and was truly impressed. It's hard for one to describe him. His films are strange, surreal, they are just too much! It's this kind my most favorite, that one I always seek It's as if John Waters, David Lynch or maybe Louis Bunuel dropped something from their uniqueness into Shroeter's mind and then he evolved it into something more special and personal! To all this, add the obsession of the director with opera and then we maybe can have a picture of his work. Anyway, about this film. This flick, "Malina", is a work of art. Isabelle Huppert is a great actress anyway. But, in this particular one, she overcomes herself. If the Oscar is the ultimate award to an actor then we are talking about an award winning performance. Unfortunately though - and this is a huge issue to be analyzed within a few sentences- there are plenty of times when these awards go to actors who don't deserve it. I think it would be fair to acknowledge productions outside and beyond the USA. Of course American independent cinema is amazingly worthy but sadly 80% of it is ignored by the Academy. I am going to rate this film with a nine though it doesn't need my rate. It's so extraordinary that it's above judgment.

My answer to the ridiculously low status of this complete masterpiece.

Malina presents us so many innovations that we are getting toward in the 2000's (Charlie Kaufman) or the 2010's (Terrence Malick) and where we will eventually get (perhaps never); mostly it is the introspection of a writer expressed through extravagant visual means (sometimes in the spirit of the abstract early films of Schroeter like in another masterpiece, Der Tod Der Maria Malibran where the opera is not so much present as a popular show than as a series of enigmatic transitions in a abstract order). In Malina, all the qualities of the few available films in the international from Schroeter (mostly unknown outside Germany through decades), come together to give us a strangely universal film that was obviously not designed for the trendy narrative tricks of Cannes, but for more adventurous festivals (like Locarno in the 2000s'). It features the best performance I have ever seen from Isabelle Huppert, the whole range of her acting, making Haneke films the equivalent of 2D blue prints for TV pop psychology program, in comparison at least. This is not cinema for most audience, but the ones who are open minded enough to love artists for real might have a life change experience, discovering how a story can be told with such extreme means while never setting for the often far more predictable than expected 'experimental film' format. The strength comes from the balance between experimentation (mastered before it was done right for this film) and narrative skills with the help of a classic novel I was never able to understand or enjoy like this amazing film.

I know it's hard to shrink the complex content of the book in two hour film, so at this point the movie did really very well. I would say, that movie seemed to me even better than the book. Isabelle Huppert is exquisite, I had imagined her in this role while I was reading the book.

Many important imagination passages were lost in the film, but it is ok, overall the movie had enormous impact on me emotionally, I think it did its best.