Malina

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,

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, the key character of this psychological enigma, is the strong rational part of a fragile personality, which splits also in a passionate female character, played by Isabelle Huppert, both actually symbolic figures of a single personality. The story describes, in a thrilling performance of the dual actors, a disastrous love affair, where love substitutes the reason of being and in spacial reflections of her childhood and parents, unfolds the puzzle of authenticitation in a passionate relationship. Symbolic behavioral patterns are the driving elements of this movie by a german director, but in perfect line with classic French movies, e.g. by Claude Chabrol.

Silly selfindulgent ... why dont they just use their vouchers for the looney bin,

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'.