Two years ago, we talked ourselves into a muddle pondering whether Birdman could reasonably be described as even an ersatz one-shot feature. Don't those time lapses exclude it? Hitchcock's Rope certainly counted as the fake real thing. But it took the digital medium to allow a genuinely uninterrupted one-shot epic such as Alexander Sokurov's Russian Ark.
In this ingenious thriller, Sebastian Schipper brings the genre (is it that yet?) to the streets of Berlin and prompts us to wonder further about the point of it all.
The film has a strong, propulsive narrative. Victoria (Laia Costa), a young Spanish woman, meets four boozed-up layabouts at closing time in a thumping nightclub. They travel to a nearby rooftop and suck up the horizon. Victoria brings Sonne (Frederick Lau), the friendliest of the gang, back to the café where she works and, while they wait for opening time, she reveals unexpected gifts as a classical pianist. Then his friends reappear and draw her into a mad bank robbery.
Little time is allowed for the taking of breath. Costa’s superb, literally incomparable performance (after all, who else has been asked to do such a thing?) hangs around a vulnerability that hints at some unspoken trauma. There is a narrative here that could survive conventional telling.
You do not, however, embark on such a project without expecting your audience to have form continually at the front of their minds. Dr Johnson’s musings on women preaching (and dogs walking on hinds legs) are never too far away. One-shot films need not be done well – just done at all – to keep us interested. Happily, this is done very well indeed.
Watching the film is like hearing a language close to, but not quite, one’s own. When Victoria leaves Sonne in a hotel lobby and, as the camera remains stationary, walks over to the check-in desk, we half expect a cut to her conversation and then remind ourselves that isn’t allowed. Getting from one place to another becomes part of the action. The actors, largely improvising, must find things to say when sitting in cars or ambling through the streets.
How did they do that?
Decades ago, when watching the latest big-budget special effects epic, the viewer was constantly urged to wonder: "How did they do that?" With the advent of computer-generated imagery, the answers became simultaneously too simple and too complex to bother with. By way of contrast, every second scene in Victoria (if "scene" still means anything) feels like a conjuring trick that could go disastrously wrong at any moment.
The technique has an agreeable purity to it, but it inevitably forces contrivance. The bank plot is revealed and carried out in an absurdly rapid flurry. Characters make implausibly brief visits to each location before, after passing through a concertina of emotions, moving breathlessly onto the next.
But the one-shot aesthetic also permits inarguable connections with exterior reality. Victoria begins at night and ends in crisp morning daylight. The distance between locations is really the distance between locations. Balancing accommodations with a new relationship to reality – closer in some ways; more distant in others – is one of the film’s great pleasures.
Sturla Brandth Grovlen, the director of photography, is mentioned before Schipper in the end credits. That's fair enough. Victoria is, however, more than just a trick film. It's a proper thriller that argues for the single-shot as a viable medium. Better a few more such films than another avalanche of found footage.
