Victoria (2015)
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i first heard about this one when my br0 smashingjj (i think it was) posted about it in the 'rate ur last movie', simply saying Victoria - 11/10, which piqued my interest. but i'm a living void and my life is a trainwreck so it took me a while to get to it.
there was definitely a lot about it that i liked. even though it's not the first one-take affair i'd watched, this one definitely felt like it might be the single most organic one of them all. it really does feel mostly improvised, very raw, very unpolished - but it does still retain fairly impressive production values, because to be able to execute all that stuff that's happening in one straight go, is still no small feat.
what i probably liked best about this movie, is how it captures the essence of a drunken night, strolling around the sleeping city in the dark, being 'those guys' making noise and talking loudly, and then - how, because the movie is set and was shot at around 4 am, you can very realistically feel how the alchohol steams runs out, the crack of dawn starts painting up the sky, and slowly the consequences of exactly what is happening
really starts occurring to you. it made me really feel it.
but i mean, it's flawed. it's not a film like birdman, or even irreversible, where the one-take thing still feels glossy and produced (also bearing in mind that those films weren't, in fact, actually one-takes, but rather made to look like ones). this one really does feel gritty and real, perhaps because of those imperfections. the actors stutter and stagger with their dialogues sometimes (being half german, half broken english anyway), there are some 'less-than-prestigious' camerawork choices (cameraman cramming into a tiny elevator with the cast, or shooting from a really low angle during car drive scenes, so you can't really see much of anything, etc) , and just generally you can catch some minor fuckups here and there (piano playing scene anyone?). tbh i'm usually one to prefer works that are somewhat more slick (be it music, film or painting), and yet there was a lot to appreciate here.
the first hour, hour and a half of the film, is just a drunken night caught on film. it's kinda slow, almost too slow, then it starts picking up. it's juts so fucking cool that it never stops. even through driving scenes, going from place to place. it just keeps rolling, like real life. no trying to get around it or concoct some occurrence to fill that time. something about how the one-take thing was executed in this film was just really appealing to me. smart, brave choices i suppose.
there are some qualms to be made about the choices characters make during the course of the film - like, are you kiding me, who would actually act like that? what kinda girl would join a gang of four dangerous-looking, loudmouthed, potentially violent guys at 4 in the morning? what kind of a girl would agree to carry out a robbery some dudes she met in a drunken stupor less than an hour ago? sometimes that stuff hampers the plot a little bit, like 'oh are they really going with that? well ok then'. but for the most part it's entertaining and bubbling.
another thing i liked was how the movie starts and ends - like, the camera just kinda wanders around, stumbles onto the lead character, and sticks with her right until the movie ends, and then it just stops somewhere and watches her go. i always had a thing for that trick - like in that massive attack video for 'unfinished sympathy' or something. makes it feel
real. just following around a person in this world, and then letting them go.
yeah, anyway. interesting film. i certainly got into it once it got rolling. it felt like a different take on movies in general. because at the end of the day, it's just another heist movie in a sea of heist movies. but it sets itself apart in the way it tells a story about people, in a way that makes you experience it more deeply. kind of like how the strong points of Boyhood (i'll ignore the bad ones rn) made it different from other movies. the novelty of how it was executed made it feel fresh, and mostly not like just a gimmick.
i probably don't even need to explain how much better that movie could have been had that camera followed MY life for those 2.5 hours. man, my life is exciting as fuck.
*refreshes netphoria*