VICTORIA (2015)

Do you remember Birdman (2014), the Michael Keaton-starring black comedy-drama, directed by Mexican filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu? It opened the Venice Film Festival to much critical acclaim and went on to be a sizeable commercial hit. The reason why I’m mentioning it is because the entire feature looks like it was shot in one continuous take, when in fact, the reality was that scenes were carefully rehearsed, timed, and filmed multiple times to aid the editing process so it could be presented as this magical one-shot illusion. Hitchcock did something similar with Rope (1948). The results are indeed impressive; however, a year later, following Birdman, German director Sebastian Schipper actually did achieve this remarkable one-take feat with his taut, edge-of-the-seat drama, Victoria.

The film opens with the titular Victoria (Laia Costa) dancing in a nightclub to DJ Koze’s hypnotic techno track Burn With Me. After leaving the club around 4 am, she meets four guys: Sonne, Boxer, Blinker, and Fuß, who have all clearly been drinking. They’re attracted to Victoria, partly because she’s pretty, but also because she’s Spanish and, as she explains to them, a newcomer to their home city of Berlin. The group ends up on a rooftop drinking and bonding, with clear chemistry emerging between Victoria and Sonne. Some time later, Boxer explains that he needs a favour: he owes a debt to a gangster named Andi for protection he received when serving time in prison. Thanks to Fuß being too drunk, Victoria is asked to be a driver on an errand for Andi. Though Sonne is hesitant, she agrees. The job turns out to be a €50,000 bank robbery—€10,000 for Andi, the rest split between the group. They initially refuse, but Andi threatens to take Victoria hostage, forcing them to comply. The robbery goes surprisingly smoothly, and no one is hurt. Later, after they’ve celebrated back at the club, they spot police near their car—with Fuß still inside, unconscious. A chase ensues, and their night spirals into chaos as they try to evade capture.

If this synopsis sounds a tad unbelievable, particularly around the point that Victoria opts to help the gang on their little heist, then it’s a testament to the talented cast and superb direction that at no point while you’re watching it do you doubt anything that’s on screen in front of you. To say the dialogue between all the actors sounds real is very much an understatement; the majority of the lines were in fact improvised, probably because the finished script was only 12 pages long, in which case, the end result is a happy accident that only led to giving the film its raw, naturalistic tone.

Despite the thumping opening soundtrack, what immediately holds your attention from frame one is the stunning cinematography by Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen. Straight away, this looks more like a documentary instead of a typical glossy movie; the camera expertly picks up the other people dancing around our female lead, some clear, some in an almost silhouette form; the lighting pulses between bright strobing flashes and near-darkness. As a viewer, you genuinely feel like you’re there on the dance floor; you can almost feel the heat and smell the sweat from the bodies in the room. Schipper keeps the camera on Laia Costa’s Victoria pretty much all throughout this sequence: even though she appears to be on her own, she is obviously enjoying the music and dancing with no inhibitions.

Much like the direction and cinematography, Costa sets the tone of this feature effortlessly. Her performance is confident and very natural; in short, she comes across as a real person interacting in a real place and time. This all helps give the film an air of authenticity, and puts you, the viewer, straight into this other reality with the performers, where you’re invisibly observing and following these people around. The end result is that, from very early on, your attention is locked on the movie, and whatever happens next, you’re very happy to go along with the ride.

Even though Costa is clearly a strong performer, the rest of the film’s cast prove to be an able match: all looking and sounding like young twenty-somethings, and most importantly, coming across like they’ve known each other for years. Aside from Costa, German actor Frederick Lau’s performance as Sonne shines throughout. Immediate impressions make him come across as a bit of an immature idiot, but a scene fairly early on in the story forces another side of his personality on to you and changes your perspective about him.

After the initial 20 minutes where we see this young group bonding, Victoria explains that she has to leave them because she’s opening up a café shortly and needs some rest beforehand. As it’s late, Sonne says he’ll escort her back, and once inside the café with some obvious flirting going on, Victoria plays a Mephisto Waltz masterfully on a piano and shares with him that she sacrificed much of her childhood and early adult life with training to be a concert pianist, only to be told she wasn’t good enough by her music school. Sonne can’t believe it as, from seeing his face earlier, he’s been very moved by Victoria’s incredible piano playing. She’s also very emotional and still feeling upset about this. Alongside the strong acting, what makes the scene so pivotal is the strength of the writing: from just one five-minute scene, we learn a great deal about Victoria’s backstory and why, perhaps, she’s now making a new life for herself in another country. It also cleverly acts as a breather between the first and second acts: here an entire tonal shift occurs, moving the film from indie comedy-drama to edge-of-the-seat crime thriller in almost a blink of an eye.

Writers Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Eike Frederik Schulz—along with Sebastian Schipper—expertly segue into this darker phase of the film when we see our once carefree group of lads soon take on a more serious and apprehensive demeanour while they’re in the car on the way to the rendezvous to meet gangster Andi. This isn’t a game, and even at this point, when they don’t even know what’s in store for them, they know that it’s going to have some sort of criminal element to it. You can practically feel tensions rising, and when they drive down into the underground car park and see Andi’s men all armed and waiting, the look on their faces goes from nervous to shit-scared in about a millisecond—Victoria also looks terrified, knowing at this point that she’s made a mistake but it’s now too late to turn back.

Given how Schipper’s previous directorial efforts very much reside in the comedy-drama territory, it’s quite incredible how he manages to switch genres so effortlessly, and with so much aplomb. The film’s origins are also interesting. In an interview with The Guardian back in 2015, he explains that his idea came about following a daydream: “My mind wanders often, and my mind wandered off one day to robbing a bank,” he says. “Of course, I knew that I wouldn’t do it—but I can make a film about it. It popped my balloons so drastically.”

The director was actually an actor for seven years before turning his talents to behind the camera. All of his filmography, going back to 1992, lies very much in the German market, with one exception being when he had a bit part playing a soldier in Anthony Minghella’s Oscar winner, The English Patient (1996). As a director and writer, he’s made five features including Victoria. Considering the critical and relative commercial success of his one-take crime tale, it’s a little surprising that he’s only made a single film since, Roads (2019), concerning a British teenager embarking on a road trip with a Congolese illegal immigrant.

So how did Schipper achieve this one-shot marvel? To secure funding, he agreed to create a backup version of the film using conventional editing if the one-take concept didn’t work out. This alternative version was shot first over 10 days, using a series of 10-minute continuous takes, ensuring there would be a finished film regardless of the outcome of the single-take attempt. Schipper later described this edited version as “not good”.

Victoria’s production budget allowed for only three attempts at filming. Over 10 days, the cast and crew rehearsed before shooting the film in its entirety for the first time. The shoot started at 4:30 am and concluded around 7 am, spanning 22 locations across downtown Berlin. Following the first full attempt, they took a 10-day break before doing it all over again. Two days later, they shot Victoria for a third and last time. This final take is the one used for the finished film.

Schipper felt the first try fell flat because the actors played it too safe, overly worried about making mistakes. The second attempt swung too far in the other direction, with the cast going “crazy,” leading Schipper to feel both “angry” and “terrified,” knowing he had just one shot left. He responded with what he called a “hairdryer speech”—a tense, emotionally charged meeting that, as he put it, “was not a meeting that ended in hugs and ‘good talk.’ It was crazy. But the tension was built on knowing we wanted the same thing.” According to Schipper, the final take succeeded because it captured an intensity—an “aggression”—that had been missing from the previous shoots.

Rounding off the film’s technical brilliance is German musician, composer, and record producer Nils Frahm. Prior to this, Frahm’s output largely consisted of piano-heavy music, but here he uses expert cello playing and ambient guitar brilliantly. It’s quite moody and sparse, but nevertheless highly effective. Electronic work is utilised too: the scene when the group go back into the nightclub after the robbery to celebrate is stunningly realised when the club’s techno music is faded out to be replaced by a softer, more playful soundscape—all juxtaposed beautifully against footage of the characters’ playful interactions around the dance floor to an almost dreamlike effect.

This celebration scene’s fun interlude soon jumps to drama and terror when the group are heading back to pick up Fuß and see some policemen around their parked car, who are obviously responding to the bank’s alert of the robbery. A chase ensues which goes from bad to worse when shots are fired and Victoria and Sonne hide in an apartment complex while the authorities are shouting to the residents to lock their doors and stay inside. Here the tension is ratcheted up tenfold as we see them try to work out their escape. I won’t spoil anything, but needless to say, the final minutes are a masterwork in suspense and acting, and it’s during these concluding sequences that Spanish actor Laia Costa shows why she was chosen to play the lead in this film. In a matter of two or three scenes, her emotional range goes from joy to terror, then to anger and heartbreak—all seamlessly, and when you consider it was done in one take, it’s all the more astounding for it.

Upon its release, Victoria received strong reviews and went on to make over $3 million against a tiny budget of just €443,500. The Hollywood Reporter described the film as a “kinetic, frenetic, sense-swamping rollercoaster ride” but said the plot was somewhat implausible. Variety reviewed the film well, saying it’s “suffused with a surprising degree of grace and emotional authenticity.” It also won a few awards, including German Film Awards for ‘Best Fiction Film and Direction’, and following a screening at the 65th Berlin International Film Festival, Sturla Brandth Grøvlen won a Silver Bear for ‘Outstanding Artistic Contribution for Cinematography’.

Seeing it for the first time in the cinema, I remember thinking that the whole auditorium was barely breathing. Come the final half-hour, you could literally hear a pin drop, and I’m sure that myself and my friend had moved to the edge of our seats. Rewatching it recently for this feature, the film has lost none of its power. Yes, the aforementioned acting, direction, and cinematography are first-rate, but the real-time screenplay by Schipper, along with Olivia Neergaard-Holm and Eike Frederik Schulz, is also expertly constructed. It really is a great example of everything firing on all cylinders, and one of those rare films that leaves you speechless come the closing credits. Simply unmissable.

GERMANY • FRANCE • USA | 2015 | 138 MINUTES | 2.35:1 | COLOUR | GERMAN • ENGLISH • SPANISH • TURKISH

Cast & Crew

director: Sebastian Schipper.
writers: Olivia Neergaard-Holm, Sebastian Schipper & Eike Frederik Schulz.
starring: Laia Costa, Frederick Lau, Franz Rogowski, Max Mauff, Burak Yiğit, André Hennicke.