Undine

The movie that made me fall in love with Berlin, which I went twice and couldn't love. A modern Romeo + Juliet story from the Germans. A visual and auditory feast.

A film with a unique spirit that breaks down the prejudices of "Germans can't make a love movie" and "German is not an emotional language".

The strength of petzold is his combination of reality and illusion, the present and history, creating a strong literary emotional image to capture the real, create illusion and make people intoxicated

As with much of Christian Petzhold's work, UNDINE connects storytelling with myth -making more than with most filmmakers. Undine is a mythical European legend about a water nymph (over time it has morphed into mermaids, selkies etc.). As is often the case in his movies, Petzhold uses specific details and settings to ground his tale. Here, it's modern day Berlin.

Our Undine (the terrific Paula Beer) is a historian and part-time tour guide for the city's planning bureau. By happenstance, a local industrial diver, Christoph (Franz Rogowski), catches one of her lectures and a relationship begins. As expected, the pair's union is an unusual one. It's not long before Christoph takes Undine for a dive in what he assumes will be HIS comfort zone. There are some beautiful underwater sequences in the movie and they subtly reveal Undine's true nature.

To his credit, Petzhold (who also wrote the screenplay) never underlines to the viewer that this is an ancient fairy tale. The viewer is expected to participate. The lectures which Undine gives about the emergence of a unified Berlin after the fall of the Soviet empire are all about uniting the two different world views, and can be read as symbolic of the central relationship here. Beer is entrancing and again shows why she is one of Europe's rising young stars (she won multiple awards for her performance). Rogowski, who teamed with Beer memorably in the Petzhold's previous TRANSIT, has a burly but, vulnerable masculinity. Hans Fromm's cinematography is fine and the classical musical selections are appropriate (with an assist from the Bee Gees!).

Still, like his other outright fantasy, YELLA, there is something a bit missing from Petzhold's script. That film took it's cues from the cult classic CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962), and here, some may detect a certain kinship with Val Lewton's masterpiece CAT PEOPLE (1942). Original legend and possible homage aside, UNDINE has to work on its own as a drama, and on that level it's slightly disappointing. The various threads, as good as they are at times, never quite fully connect. UNDINE is certainly worth seeing, but, it's not quite up to Petzhold's high standards.

... and that shape can be pretty much whatever you want it to be which, depending on your interpretation, might be as hot as a kettle or as cold as ice, a sinker or a floater, completely cloudy and obscure or gin crystal clear. Beautiful performances all round, elegantly performed, imaginative and, in my view, water worth testing, if for no other reason than to test yourself..

Very well played by the main cast, but not necessarily deserved Golden Bear for best actress. Nice underwater shots and a warm story about love, deception, hope and destiny. Not so much a must-see and not necessarily A-festival Competition material, but enjoyable to watch.