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Rating: In the middle of the night, decadence knocked on my doors.
Lorelei's thin coppery hair was illuminated like sunrays, adorned with primroses and shells that decorated her shoulders and bosom; her mirror was the clear waters of the Spree, which for centuries have washed over a shape-shifting Berlin, risen, lost, and reborn from the dry bed of its native river.
From the early Slavs of Brandenburg, Lorelei's song has troubled, in Germanic folklore but not only, myriad generations of men. In tradition, the ondines are beautiful and soulless muses, who only gain human misfortunes when their love is equally returned.
This bizarre work by C. Petzold begins with a typically Godardian epilogue; Undine and Johannes are secluded in a bistro in front of the museum where she works as a freelance tour guide, presenting the urban projects of Berlin to tourists. Sitting across from each other, the silences foretell that their relationship is already at its closing credits. She says “If you leave me for her, you will die, remember it.” The firmness of this statement reveals a magical atmosphere, which is supernaturally the essence of Petzold's cinema and often a cause of bewilderment for the unwary viewer, who struggles to govern their eyelids with the symbols and hyperboles of his language. From there onward, in fact, with a staging sometimes surprising, there will come into play, in order, a new tender and occasionally awkward lover for the young Undine, a diving artisan, fragments of an aquarium shattered by the emotion of the first meeting on Undine's belly, a wine stain that looks like blood on the apartment wall, the appearance of a huge catfish, in the depths of the river, along with a tombstone depicting, in the riverbed, the name of Undine, the revealed genesis of the nymph, or an anticipation of her future abode...
In psychoanalysis, often the siren's song was the most genuine and pure expression of the processes of the social unconscious, a driver of an initiation into the perceptions of a fairytale world that, after some playful and brief interludes, finally brought to the surface man's most ancestral fears.
But also the more material and tangible ones, like the distance and perplexity of change.
And if the subtext of Undine's profession, of her employment within the Humboldt Forum museum as a guide might seem like a pretext to shed light on the integrated and social figure of the nymph, the content of her expositions, on the urban history of the city, its historical divisions, is rich with material and intrinsically morphologically linked to the same myth embodied by the young protagonist.
From this song, which in the film is endowed with its personal choral presence, exclusively orchestrated by Bach's Adagio in D minor, a psychomagical story is evoked of an ondine seemingly perfectly integrated into the social fabric of her Berlin, a museum guide that displays a careful poetic on Berlin's architectural infrastructures with interweavings of politics, culture, and economy, culminating, after smoothing all corners, in the eternal dialectic between the memories of the old city and the new that impassively advances.
And in this Pantheon, when needed urbanized and evolved into a digital metropolis, what more visionary emblem of Berlin could there be.
With a city that architecturally was a mirror to two precise and distinct ideologies, a hyper-modern city risen precisely from its historical ruins, from the architectures of the void logic characterizing the DDR to the new western modernity of the capital, which all history has swallowed in one gulp; is this perhaps the negation of progress, Undine lets slip "off plan" in the middle of one of her expositions to tourists in the museum.
Or perhaps it could be spoken of as the negation of love, as when Johannes reconsiders and returns to the scene, all the new balances, even with the new lover, collapse one after the other, in the recognition that it is not simple to aseptically change a direction, a path only to re-trace a more modern and functional one, without then inevitably reckoning with the weight of all those scars...
A gravitational work, suspended between Myth and Urbanism, in between the hidden plot of Petzold's thought leaves few certainties and many question marks, even when the direction risks harakiri and the impossible, in the finale moreover stunning, literally quoting one of the most fascinating works of the 1900s, "L'Atalante" by Jean Vigo.
Maintaining, even in that proverbial incident, always its elegant fluidity.
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