Malina

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.

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.

I just saw two of Schröeter's films (admittedly much earlier, by about a decade, when his career, such as it was, was just beginning). The first was some unnamed cheap piece of boring fluff where he uses mildly artistic backdrops to pretend his (mostly undressed, the only virtue of the film) characters are on a world tour, and der Bomberpilot—translation available—in which three female (and only occasionally nude) friends go from entertaining Hitler on stage to boring hundreds, on stage and in this film, in a self-indulgent plot-less (sorry, the IMDb editor refuses to print that as one word, so I had to add a hyphen) semi-musical—without any musicality—European and American—sense a theme here?—romp nearly as pointless as the previous film. No pilot of any kind, nor any war planes, make an appearance, though a 707 plays a brief supporting role.

With that, and also, like Shane Anderson previously on this page, being a massive Bachmann fan and awed Malina admirer, and having read the reviews here and the scant criticism available on German sites (that should tell you something), I feel no loss in having decided not to even bother seeing it at all tonight, tho it was being shown, with subtitles (my German is good enough for reading, not good enough for plays and movies), a mere 9 blocks from my house. I suggest you do the same.

I can vouch for Anderson's terse yet comprehensive summation without having seen what even ten years into Schröeter's career can only be, in his incapable hands, another travesty, despite having secured the estimable Huppert. As to commenter JustApt's insight into the 'animal' anagram of the title, it's useful to know that there are NO German cognates for animal, the German word for which is 'Tier'.

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.

Absolutely required viewing for serious fans of Isabelle Huppert! Here, she doesn't just set the screen on fire, she sets the set on fire, and herself, too. The incomparable Huppert is the only actor alive who could have performed this role, her most schizophrenic, over-the-top performance ever. A script so schizo, I can't imagine trying to comprehend it in only one viewing, so schizophrenic that the scriptwriter,