‘Our teacher said to us that 90% of us… we are wasting our time…’
I could recently be found extolling the virtues of the one shot movie when discussing Philip Barantini’s instant classic Boiling Point. While that film was a carefully choreographed waltz through a busy restaurant kitchen, a perfectly executed plan created to give the impression of chaos, Victoria is something else entirely…
Victoria (Laia Costa) is an ordinary Madrid girl working in an ordinary cafe in Berlin until she meets Sonne (Frederick Lau) – an affable if unpredictable local boy who wants to show her the sights. Unfortunately, this also involves recruiting Victoria to be the getaway driver for a badly thought out bank robbery that inevitably goes terribly wrong.
I don’t want to keep making comparisons with Boiling Point, but while the latter film came in at a relatively skinny 92 minutes, all shot in one location, Victoria takes its characters on a mad dash through the streets of Berlin. We move from clubs to underground car parks to hotels and back again. As a consequence of this, Sebastian Schipper’s film always feels on the verge of falling apart. This is not a criticism. In fact, it is living this close to the edge that makes Victoria so compelling. The shaky character work and occasional flubbed line only add to the sense of a life coming apart at the seams.
Aided by an astonishing performance in the titular role from Costa, Victoria is a wild and stressful dance through one life changing evening in the lives of a waitress and four hapless German men. Crucially, while there are moments that feel a little ostentatious (at one point Victoria climbs on Sonne’s shoulders while they ride the pavements of Berlin, in another scene, she performs a long and complex piano solo), pretty much everything here serves the plot rather than the one shot premise. As with all films that go down this road, in its best moments, the viewer forgets about the concept all together as they are so lost in the action.
Victoria is a genuinely stunningly executed film that stands alone as possibly the most impressive one shot film ever made. It should have won Oscars. Instead, it’ll have to settle for hearts and minds.