Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria opens with a hard techno sound and a strobe light that makes you blink. A dance club slowly appears through the barrage of sound and light. A young woman is dancing. She’s lively, with a striking playful smile, and dark hair in a bouncing ponytail and bangs. She’s Victoria, a young foreigner who works an early morning shift at a café in Berlin.
At the club, she meets Sonne and three of his buddies who follow her out as she gets her bike to head home before work. The four boys are a little older than Victoria. They’re also drunk, and immediately they seem too playful, too insistent that she go with them.
The jumpy energy of the opening scene feels off-kilter and unsettling. Like the boys, the filming comes with a nervousness that puts you on edge. Through all of the tightly-wound banter, Victoria, played by Spanish actress Laia Costa, keeps smiling. You wonder if she’s naive, if she’s playing for time to get away from the four guys, or if she’s really stupid.
Sonne (Frederick Lau) and the other boys don’t do anything overtly hostile or threatening, yet the action feels like it’s leading to no good. When they steal some sodas from a convenience store while the clerk is asleep, you notice that Victoria has no trouble grabbing a few bottles and afterward hopping around with the high that follows the small transgression.
Sebastian Schipper shot the movie in one long take that runs about 135 minutes. It’s been done before. In 1948 with Rope, Alfred Hitchcock faked a film with no edits; in 2000, Mike Figgis made Time Code which used four one-take films shown on screen simultaneously in quadrants. Aleksandr Sokurov made Russian Ark in 2002, in one long take that incorporated centuries of Russian history. It can be a gimmick, but here, with cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, it brings you in to the relentless whirlpool of a single night with five people bound for trouble.
The camera seldom stops moving. It runs in tight on a face and then back out to take in a wider scene; there’s a choreography to the film with the boys one by one approaching Victoria to say something, to kid her, to cajole – and then backing out to leave space for the next boy’s turn. The film takes place at night, so there’s a lot of dark space around the group as they make their start-stop way around the city.
The boys are jacked up about something – for a while you don’t know what – and it turns out that it’s not rape. One of the boys has been in jail, and he owes this night to a career criminal who’d helped him out. It’s a bank job, and one surprise is that Victoria can be as enthusiastic as the rest of them.
When you’re immersed in this movie – and it pulls you right into its center – you never know where it’s heading. These are volatile characters. Even Victoria, with all the hesitation that shows on her face, is as impulsive as the others. One of the boys is too drunk to drive, so out of the blue, she pipes up. She’ll do it – and you’re left to wonder if this sweet kid is anything at all like how she looks.
Meanwhile, as the camera jumps from face to face to group to face, the film never relaxes the sense that while all this activity takes place in a coherent space and a defined period of time, events and behavior can still be governed by impulse. No intention drives these young people; it’s not as if they’ve planned an evening of flirting and armed robbery. Their nervous systems are just bouncing around, taking any path that looks like fun. But it’s all got a direction.
In spite of the jangly speed of their movements, these five people are headed slowly and certainly into depths they never imagined.
