Undine (2020, Christian Petzold) (Patreon)

57/100

I guess there are spoilers here if you know absolutely nothing about this film (with the title telling you zilch) and would prefer to keep it that way. As noted below, however, that approach arguably kinda backfired for me in this case. You're probably better off going in having seen the logline.

Embarrassing admission: Despite having seen and quite enjoyed Neil Jordan's Ondine, plus being a reasonably well-educated person in general, I failed to recognize the mythological significance of this film's title. (Had read nothing in advance.) Just accepted it as the protagonist's first name and assumed its similarity to Ondine was coincidental, even after Rogowski's professional diver gets introduced. Consequently, certain aspects—most notably, "dumping Undine = death"—didn't land quite the way they were presumably intended to, with the supernatural element feeling to me as if it arrives out of nowhere. While I don't think that rewatching the film, properly contextualized, would much improve it in my mind, I do feel obligated to confess that I fundamentally didn't "get it" the first time, at least insofar as I didn't comprehend that Undine is not human. (It perhaps didn't help that I'd recently revisited Kusturica's Underground, which is more or less set in the real world but happens to depict dead characters as happily alive underwater. Made me think magical realism rather than myth.) Paula Beer assiduously underplays the role, which on the one hand left me in the dark about what's really going on but on the other hand gives the film a solid emotional foundation that to some degree renders any confusion irrelevant. In any case, knowing about undines wouldn't make the prevailing architectural metaphor any less blunt, and that's my major hangup here; we spend so much time listening to Undine explicate Berlin's pre- and post-Cold War layout that it's impossible not to be distracted by speculation about those lectures' intended subtext...which Petzold then just goes ahead and pretty much spells out in dialogue, with Undine casually observing that form follows function and that there's something untoward about repurposing an 18th-century palace as a contemporary museum. (How this notion applies to her relationships with Johannes and Christoph is ostensibly left as an exercise for the viewer.) People who weren't bothered by this yellow-highlighter approach in Museum Hours can ignore me here, I guess. Petzold's a superb formalist, though, and I dearly wish that he'd develop a much lighter touch as a dramatist. If anything, retroactively learning that some of Undine's weirder touches are rooted in mythology makes me like the film a bit less.