Malina

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.

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.

In Werner Schroeter's very free interpretation of Ingeborg Bachmann's novel "Malina" (1971), the main character has no name, but appears in four reflections, two of them are the male main characters Malina and Ivan. Moreover, Schroeder used even two light-doubles for a famous mirror scene in which the female character appears in a "chiastic" and thus non-Aristotelian relation. We already see: Schroeder's movie is a movie about the splitting of individuality, but not simply by creating Doppelgängers, as, e.g. R.W. Fassbinder did in the characters of Hermann Hermann and Felix Weber in "Despair" (1978), but so that every time one of the two male reflections and one of the two female reflections stand in an over-cross relation to one another. This had been done before in such a splendid manner only once: by E.T.A. Hoffmann in his "Princess Brambilla" (1820). A comparison of the time of Schroeter and that of Hoffmann is made here not merely by the coincidence of some motives, but by the fact that Schroeter very often uses Pre-Illumination procedures instead of telling a story in the rationalist way. Very often, this happens by the use of mythological movies or specific themes out of operas. We remember the famous Paphnutius episode in which the former fairy Rosabelverde appears as Fräulein Von Rosenschöngrün and the puzzled narrator explains that by order of the ruler all non-rationalist concepts have been banned out of the state. However, we are also told that certain relics of thought have survived, and in the modern time of film we mostly meet them in the fascinating oeuvre of Schroeter where causality appears together with magical series, the subject is subject to a topic taken from association rather than logic and so on. In a certain, no less fascinating, way one could say that Schroeter uses for deconstruction of our reality, based on two-valued logic, not the famous procedures prepared by Derrida and already by Heidegger, but by dissolving rational structures in the streams of Pre-Enlightenment pictures. When the female main character, who doubtlessly bears the signs of writer Ingeborg Bachmann herself, talks about her constant pains and her impossibility to live under the premises of her work and the two men who are her projections, we realize that Bachmann's writing (including her PhD dissertation about fundamental ontology) are interpreted by Schroeter from the standpoint of deconstructing femininity. After having destroyed her femininity up to a certain measure by construction of her different mirror images ("I exist only in the mirror", she says in the movie), she tries to construct it newly by means of what one would call language criticism methodology based on the fundamental ontology of her own work. To see that and how she fails leads in Schroeter's movie to a spectacular last scene - and also in Bachmann's 47-years-old-life in "reality". In reality?

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.