The Noir City Film Festival in San Francisco closes tonight. We couldn’t be there, living as we do across the ocean, but like last year we screened some of the films at home and that has been a treat. We said at the end of last year’s group of write-ups that we probably wouldn’t do it again, and that turned out to be a lie. Next year we definitely won’t do it. It’s fun, but makes the website almost like actual work, which isn’t what this is about at all. It isn’t you, Noir City, it’s us.
Tonight’s final entries on the festival slate are Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, which we’ve discussed below, and the film for which see two promo posters above—Victoria. The hook here is the movie is shot by director Sebastian Schipper and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen in one take—not many takes digitally spliced, but a single analog take about two hours and fifteen minutes long, beginning in the wee Berlin hours and extending into dawn. Schipper has said in interviews that he had three chances to get it right, and the finished film the is the result of the third effort.
It tells the story of Spanish millennial Victoria (Laia Costa), whose lonely existence is changed when she meets local boy Sonne (Frederick Lau) and his three friends during a night at a disco. Sonne seems like a nice enough guy, and Victoria leaves with him and his buds for a sojourn along streets and a rooftop that ends with the two agreeing to meet again. It’s at that point one of the friends get sick from all the booze he’s ingested, and Sonne desperately asks Victoria to drive the remaining trio somewhere. Why? Because wherever they’re going there are supposed to four of them and three will not do. Uh oh. Where are the boys going? To commit an armed robbery.Victoria doesn’t know this at first. It becomes clear soon enough, but only after she’s in too deep and stuck as a getaway driver. Of course, the audience knows she’s in trouble long before that. If there’s a flaw with the movie it’s merely that Victoria doesn’t seem lonely, reckless, or clueless enough to get herself into this mess. But maybe that’s a function of the movie’s nature. We can’t know her in two hours, filmed in real time,
with no structural concessions for subplots, flashbacks, or any of the standard expository digressions. We have to take her at face value, and accept her as revealed to us. If you do, then the blossoming of her inner danger junkie is logical and seamless. Victoria is really an astounding achievement, and not just because of the single take. Schipper is almost twenty years older than the cast he directs, but he’s made a generational landmark of a film.
