1 out of 5

Directed by: Sebastian Schipper

Jesus, I feel stupider having watched this film.  ‘Victoria’ is a one-take film, and the main credit I can give director Schipper is in not getting flashy about that: the movie is not rubbing it in your face.  But then I’m left to wonder: why?  I would say one-takes or single shot scenes can serve a few purposes – to be technically impressive; to ‘hold’ the viewer in a moment in order to escalate tension; shot commodity – something done more as a logistic consideration than an artistic one, to not “waste” a shot.  And of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive.  Since the structure of ‘Victoria’ is to show us one bad night in the life of the titular lead, we’ll suppose the second of those three purposes was the primary consideration.  Alas, as the camera just sort of floats with events, it doesn’t really accomplish this too well – some of column A, or giving in to that flashiness, might’ve helped.  Alternately (or, again, in combination), the script could have worked a little harder to make things make sense and to make us care about Victoria, and the boys she meets in a club and ends up following around for two plus hours through their escalating antics.

But let’s pause there to dissect two things: 1. Two plus hours.  There’s no need for this.  At about thirty minutes of Linklater-like wandering conversation (but without most of the charm, without the character, or without, even, the obnoxiousness of Waking Life), I found myself glancing at the clock.  At about fifty minutes, after what’s intended to be the turning point of the movie, I was wondering what the fuck we’d be doing for the rest of the runtime, a wonder which was answered with a resounding Nothing.  See above about the lack of tension.  2. Escalating antics.  Hardly.  Basically, one bad thing happens, and while I think the film does an acceptable job of forming the bonds and showing the characters’ recklessness that might allow things to go from A to B, it also clearly makes zero sense.  Time constraints and “all of you must go” requirements are put in place that sort of make you think the story is gearing up to reveal something more is going on, but no, these are all just stuff-it-in-the-script details to justify the setup.

Which wraps back around to our investment in Victoria and the character she ends up mostly bonding with, Sonne: our actors admittedly imbue their roles with plenty of humanity, but I just couldn’t deal with how unnecessary everything felt, from the one-shot decision to the particular knitting together of scenes – it all functions as a house of cards, balanced on the concept of this “one bad night done in one take” idea.  Which isn’t a bad idea at all! — but we needed something with more stakes; we needed a lead that offered us more of a hook so that we felt swept up along with her.  Yes, the acting is good, but I didn’t feel like an observer, I felt like the camera was the catalyst.

This isn’t to mention how irredeemably stupid the characters act in the wake of that turning point (you know, for that remaining hour and a half of film).  A noir script would’ve twisted the knife with this, but just like our meet-in-the-club starting point, it almost seemed like we were supposed to see this as a slice of life, regular folk getting swept up in bad things.  Sure, like a lazy ass script and a pointless movie executed with an impressive – from an effort standpoint, not exactly visually – but also ultimately pointless one-take.