Victoria Convinced Me How Valuable Great Acting Is

Based on the title of this piece I feel like I owe an explanation (to those of you reading on Facebook it's "Victoria Convinced Me How Valuable Great Acting Is"). I believe good acting is important to the art of storytelling. Convincing performances go a long ways in bringing characters to life and strengthening the connection between the audience and said characters. Ultimately all pieces of large scale media projects are a collaborative effort between many extremely talented and hardworking people, actors very much included. But I believe at the very heart of most these projects lie the most important elements, the composer(s), writer(s), and director(s). I will stand by my statement that stellar acting cannot make a film with weak writing and direction good, but a film with below average acting with impressive writing and direction can still survive on the strength of the latter elements. 

However sometimes there are exceptions to this stance of mine…one that has successfully challenged it and taken it to task, though in fairness, unlike most films it has truly been given a chance to by the structure of this particular work.

Victoria is a German film from 2015, directed by Sebastian Schipper. Its premise is fairly straightforward. The titular Victoria is a Spanish girl is out partying at an underground club in Berlin early in the morning. On her wait out she encounters four friendly German men whom she forms a connection with fairly quickly. Having only lived in Germany for three months and not a fluent German speaker she naturally welcomes this newfound social connection. As events progress however she finds herself in the middle of a bank heist due to the connections of her new friends.

It’s plot is nothing particularly earth-shattering. But I’ll tell you what is: this movie was filmed in one continuous take. That’s right. From the opening scenes to the end credits, the camera does not cut once throughout the entire movie. Not only is this WILDLY ambitious in it’s own right, in particular because it is a truly authentic continuous take (not edited to look like one as other films have done) but it creates a feeling of raw intimacy, not just with the natural lighting and real sounds of actual early morning Berlin, but to create the illusion that we are an immediate bystander to the events that are unfolding before our eyes. 

With this style of filmmaking a few concessions must be made, very important concessions. For one the entire filming session, in this case about 2 hours and 18 minutes, must be done all at once as well as having a very vague script, which in case you were interested to know was only 12 PAGES LONG. That means that the majority of dialogue in the film is improvised. In order to get the financers of the film on board with the single take idea director Schipper promised to them he would use traditional shot cutting as a backup plan in case his original vision did not pan out. In fact his traditional cut was filmed first in case of failure which Schipper himself has said is “not good” (I’d be FASCINATED to see this version myself if it exists somewhere). The budget permitted only THREE attempts at the one-take Schipper had envisioned. Talk about pressure! Not just on Schipper, but even more so, his cast. After a far too cautious first take and a way too over-the-top-crazy second take. They had one last chance. All or nothing. Or at the very least “all or something-the-director-doesn’t-like-at-all” the pressure had to have been suffocatingly palpable, what else could it have been?

What was achieved was nothing short of remarkable and while naturally in any film success must be given to the entire team behind it, I believe the acting in tandem with it’s already mentioned filming technique is what makes this film the marvel that it is to me.

As previously stated, since this film was one cut it’s particularly hard to script dialogue around what is currently happening. What I imagine is that each actor had a rough idea of what emotions were driving a particular scene forward and where they were in the narrative proceedings. They are given far more of a creative license than in films that have, for the most part, set in stone lines of dialogue. There’s a certain organic realism that is evident throughout the film’s runtime that I can’t remember if I’ve seen before, at least sustained from back to front. What transpires, particularly in the first-half, is a group of European twenty-somethings conversing, horsing around, being generally drunk in mostly empty streets of Berlin in such an authentic form and natural conversational rhythm that you would undoubtedly lose with scripted lines. It lends its characters a remarkably grounded feel to them because they are processing what to say and how to say it with little, and mostly no aid of what they’re supposed to be saying. They pause, stammer, forget words, just as we do in our daily conversations. It’s this ad libbed aspect that goes further than some actual character writing does to allow those we follow throughout the early morning to feel like actual people you might find in the early hours of a European city that react so very true-to-life to each situation. I also might add that Victoria, portrayed by the OUTSTANDING Laia Costa, does not speak German. That’s right, since the film is about 50% German and 50% English, half of the film Costa is essentially in the dark on the specifics of any given conversation in German between other characters. 

As the camera finally cut and the credits began to roll my first thought was of the cast and crew who I can only envision vigorously celebrating their achievement. They did it. With everything to play for they won and my goodness was it a resounding victory. Earned through determination, endeavor and an unshakable faith that it was possible. 

It wasn’t just them, it was me who earned something as well. Is that earned or should there be an L in front of it? I’ll take both thank you. Acting, when given a chance to, can be allowed to make a live-action film, or at the very least elevate it above the sum of it’s part, and while not all actors are given the chance to have this kind of creative freedom during an art project, maybe they should be given a little more opportunities to turn in performances of this unmistakable quality.