Undine (2020)

Film: Undine (2020)

Stars: Paula Beer, Franz Rogowski

Director: Christian Petzold

Oscar History: No Nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

One of the festival films that I have caught recently was Undine, a movie that I hadn't heard about until these virtual festivals started to rollout, which is a damn shame because I loved Christian Petzold's last movie.  I haven't seen all of his films, but if you remember in 2019 (does anyone remember anything before 2020?), Transit was on my Top 10 of the year and I found it mesmerizing.  The way that Petzold plays with time & romance felt like a dreamlike Casablanca, and the central performances from Franz Rogowski & Paula Beer were mesmerizing.  When I found out that the two actors had reunited with the same director, well, I was excited in a year where I've seen a lot of films that I liked, but very few that I loved.

(Spoilers Ahead) Like Transit, Undine is a movie that is lighter on plot and more on mood/interpretation, but I'll try to ground us in the film before we discuss its merits.  The movie is about Undine (Beer), an art historian who in the film's opening scenes has been dumped by a man that she loves.  She is forced, during a rough breakup, to retreat to her job & mechanically talk to a group of disinterested tourists. Afterward, she goes back to find that her ex is no longer at the restaurant, but instead a man named Christoph (Rogowski), who is peculiar but with whom she starts a romantic relationship.  Christoph is a diver who fixes water pipes in rivers, and we see repeated shots of him plunging into the water, seemingly symbolizing the way that the two are becoming more reliant upon each other.  At one point, Undine sees her ex, and Christoph calls her on it, telling her that it feels like she still loves him, & they have a fight that is un-ended because Christoph goes into a medical coma, apparently brain-dead.  Afterward, Undine commits suicide, but foolishly, because Christoph is not brain-dead, but instead comes back, longing for Undine, but eventually moving on with another woman, though in the film's final moments, still haunted by his lost love.

Undine's unusual name springs from a creature from classical literature, a type of water nymph similar to a mermaid, and one who seems to always be in ill-fated romances.  This is true of Undine in our film-without the man that she's given her heart to, she dies, another heartbreak too many.  The film is brilliant in the way that it intersperses magical realism with the actual plot of the film-using repetition to underline the mundane & extraordinary about Undine's life, and then when there's a slight betrayal of this uniformity, suddenly her life with Christoph comes crashing down.

I initially didn't like this movie as much as Transit (which I loved enough that it made my Top 25 of the decade), but that's not fair because this movie is playing with a different element than Transit.  While the previous film was focused on time & fate, and our inability to change either, this one is focusing on time's influence on love, and our ticking clock with the people we adore.  It shows these two lovers as marching toward an inevitable doom that they can't escape, with their own insecurities eventually getting the better of both of them.  Through that lens, I kind of loved Undine, but because it isn't quite as captivating, I'm going to land on a very high 4-star rather than giving that fifth star (at this point in 2020 I wonder if I've lost the ability to decipher 4 from 5 star films I keep second-guessing myself I waited so long to bestow one)-like a a few other films this year, I reserve the right to change my mind there as the movie haunts & will continue to linger in my memory.  This is done in no small part due to the lead performances, particularly Rogowski who is brilliant as Christoph, and continuing to mark himself as just one mainstream performance away from international superstardom.