By their very nature, gimmicks are designed to draw you in
with no indication that what you will be receiving is of any veritable
quality. We all fall for them, even
those of us who deal with them on a regular basis or even recognize them as
gimmicks from the outset. Victoria drew my attention with its
gimmick of having been shot in one continuous take, and though this feat is
certainly impressive, it does nothing to speak to the film’s quality and
actually acts to its detriment.
Victoria is a Spanish woman, recently transplanted to Berlin
and experiencing the night life one evening at a local club. She meets four young German men who want her
to hang out with them in the early morning hours. Despite having obligations at her job the
next morning, Victoria lets loose with her new friends, only to discover that
they have other plans later in the evening as she is corralled into assisting
them in a bank heist.
This sounds like an engaging premise, and there are
certainly moments when the film shines.
Softer character moments make Victoria in particular an engrossing
character, full of potential and promise as a musician, yet drawn into crime as
a consequence of one too many bad decisions.
Plot critical action scenes also are a highlight of the film,
particularly in how they are set up and executed over the course of one 130
minute shot, yet still remain coherent and grounded with the characters. Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen is a
force to be reckoned with, comparisons to Emmanuel Lubezki be damned.
And yet, when compared to Lubezki’s work on Birdman, a film that merely employed the
illusion of a singular take through the use of clever editing, Victoria is entirely lackluster in that
its singular take serves no purpose other than to be technically
impressive. The downside of a singular
take in a film that traverses multiple locations is that we travel with our
characters in real time, which comes together in what must have been a
remarkable Rube Goldberg machine of timing and cinematographic precision, but
there are extended scenes of characters walking from place to place, the actors
trying their best to spice up these moments with character-revealing dialogue
but to little avail. Two-plus hours is a
long time to spend a sizeable portion watching characters commute, and it
completely undermines one of the direct advantages of cinematic storytelling:
the compression of time.
Alfred Hitchcock once said that drama is life with all the
dull bits cut out, and Victoria is
the epitomization of that statement’s inverse.
By including all the dull bits, Victoria
sucks the drama out of its story, and the moments when it remembers to be an
entertaining film get lost in the mundane shuffle. Let this be a lesson that gimmicks aren’t
always worthwhile, even if they are technically impressive and deserving of
recognition for simply having been achieved.
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