In ancient mythology, the goddess of mountains, forests and waters surfaced, combed her long hair, and put an invisible blade on the neck of her beloved man. Once betrayed, she would kill him and return to the water.
But Wentini, who was wandering in Berlin, was reluctant.
She wants to break this curse and threatens her lover Johannes to hope that he will stay faithful forever, but the reality is always disappointing. After the loss of Johannes, industrial diver Christopher fell from the sky, and after a riot of silver bottles burst into water, he lay on the floor of the dismembered aquarium. The elf women who repeated the history of the land looked at each other. The red goldfish twitching from the water is the beating heart, and the bright bloodstains on the white shirt record a real and painful leap. On the second floor of the cafe opposite the Senate, water and land merge here, returning to the beginning of the world without cities.
In terms of the use of the lens, it can be seen from the beginning of the film that the lens given to Wendini is awe-inspiring. The upward shot with a certain distance outlines the supremacy of her elf god, and most of the subjective shots belonging to her are looking down, whether it is looking down through the window to check Johannes's movements, or standing on the steps and looking around the exhibition hall. The tourists who visited her, reiterated scene by scene, Wentini is an elf standing on a high ground, judging the world. Christophe's subjective lens is from the sidelines. The initial appearance is not in person, but simulated by the diver statue in the tank. Looking at Wendini through a long-range lens through the glass, their encounter has a new meaning. A sense of fate, as if it was premeditated. After waking up, Christopher returned to the old cafe to find Wendine, and he walked through the leafy porch on crutches. With the background music, in the distant view, Johannes' image is blurred. The surrounding trees were blown by the wind, and the branches and leaves swayed in the wind. The image of the wind is so closely related to finding/missing that it clearly shows the character's heart through the natural scene. In the fixed shot of Wentini slowly sinking to the bottom of the water after killing Johannes, the water surface is below her head, and then gradually calms down without a ripple, reflecting Wentini's ghostly existence, appearing with They left silently, with nowhere to look for evidence.
The film's empty mirrors are also very distinctive, in which the waters where Christophe works appear three times, all from an underwater perspective. There is no way to know the waters where Wendine came from, but her heart was reborn in that water, and eventually returned to that water. The last shot of the film is Wentini's subjective shot, watching Christoph and his wife leave on the water, and then slowly descending back to the dark bottom. As has been hinted countless times, she returns to her original, irreversible destiny.
The film uses psychological montage many times. When Wentini first explained, she saw the corner of the Senate in the city model, which reminded me of the cafe that exists there in reality and Johannes who didn't know whether to stay there. Tini's pupils dilated, during which the architectural model and the human figure overlapped. For the first time, the city and the individual intersected, and the theme was laid out here, about the inextricable connection between personal destiny and history. When Christoph woke up and went to the exhibition hall to look for Wentini, what caught his eye through the model was the scene when the two passed the long bridge together. It was a node where the two lost contact. There, He felt her heartbeat skip a beat, so he thought of the coffee shop and guided him to the next destination he was looking for.
The film is also very rich in the use of objects. The small industrial diver's sculpture is a self-portrait of Christoph, who gives the small sculpture to Wentini, which means giving himself to her. Then the sculpture experienced a fracture, and Christoph also had an accident. At the end of the underwater reunion, Wentini returned the sculpture to Christoph as a final farewell and as a symbol of the love she once had. On the way from the cafe to the museum, you pass through the reconstructed building, which functions like the factory that appears repeatedly in "The Reader", a metaphor for the history of continuous reconstruction in Germany. Another more important image is the train, which connects Wendine with Christoph. On a night before Christoph's arrival, Wentini had seen two trains meet, pass by with a brief high-pitched roar, and then calm down, implying that she and Christopher would also meet shortly after The fact of separation.
The soundtrack of this film is very simple, the consistent Bach concerto in D minor, melancholy and deep. A single note falls like a drop of water, and the pitch gradually rises, like picking up steps. Haunting in the cold streets of Berlin, cafes with glass fragments and splashing water, and Wentini's determined footsteps. Combining sound and painting, the melody of the piano makes the dignified reinforced concrete flow, making the rough lines have soft edges, and laying a soft and swaying background under the simple and calm tragedy. Another soundtrack is the song "Stayin'alive", which is first seen when Christopher takes a sleeping Windini ashore and gives her artificial respiration. Before Wentini and Christopher dived together, all things start in water, water is the original habitat of life, Wentini briefly returned to this, and in the chaos, Christopher hummed "Live" in a low voice. The spell to connect the earth and the human world again, this is the existence of this song as an awakening. The second time was on the night of the last call between the two. This time, the meaning of the song is just like the name of the song, suggesting that Windini used Christopher's life to kill Johannes in exchange for Christopher's life. Husband "live". The resurrection of two people twice represents a kind of alternation and cycle, and also a reconstruction of love.
Compared with most films, "Wendini" is silent, but the meaning of the text cannot be ignored. The larger text of this film comes from the expository words, but the seemingly written expository discourse shows a subjective attitude everywhere, and it is a metaphor for the development of the plot. On the eve of the Humboldt Forum, Wentini stood side by side with Christophe, and on the balcony, she rehearsed the next day's presentation in front of him, in which it was mentioned that "the palace was demolished ... there were a few more pieces in the center of the city." The empty space, the phantom pain after a violent amputation...the palace is rebuilt...the palace functions as a museum, but still has the shape of an 18th-century ruler...makes absolutely useless assumptions...there can be no progress". For Wendini, Johannes's initial betrayal and departure was a kind of amputation in love, and then Christoph's arrival was compensatory, a legacy after the lack of love. When the compensation gradually became a replacement, There is bound to be "pain" in the exchange of positions with the original deletion. Just like the palace will still be rebuilt, the use of the museum is an attempt to cover up the history of the old feudalism, but after all, it cannot be done. Curse that fact. And the next day, the plot of Wentini re-encountering Johannes also confirms this metaphor from the side. The theme is highlighted again, that is, the relationship between personal destiny and historical trend.
Through the above, the main theme and deep concept of the film that the director wants to portray can be interpreted from the perspective of characterization. Wentini is a historian who is responsible for telling the city's history to tourists in the Senate's exhibition hall. She works as a freelancer, lives in a short-term rental, and is difficult to find. In the end, only the red wine stains on the wall are left to prove her. The existence of , one can't help but wonder: a man who carries Berlin's past has an unknown past himself. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, the city was merged into one, and the past and future of East and West Germany will live and die together, but it is difficult for this generation of people to find a suitable position in the historical context. This blank and lack of emotions incarnate as ghosts wandering around. In the city, it does not belong to any specific time and space, and this is the source of Wendini's power. Perhaps not only Petzold's films, but the commonality of the whole German film, Wentini carried this mission to survive in a short period of ninety minutes, reviving ancient myths in the contemporary city in a silent metaphor, through private Experience speaks of the inseparability of man and history.
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