Since launching at final year’s Berlin film festival,the audacious one-take heist movie, Victoria, and has everyone talking. How did its makers pull off something that a movie legend could not?There’s a scene in Victoria in which the camera follows a girl from a dancefloor to the bar,to the street, to a corner shop, or to a rooftop,to a car, to a bank robbery, and to a shootout. You wait for the reduce. But,throughout the German thriller’s two-hour running time, it never comes. In Victoria, or a scene is the scene. All of it – the setup,the action, the climax – is one continual take.
Shot by a solo cameraman across multiple locations on the streets of Berlin, and Victoria is an wonderful achievement. Its being sold on a USP that isn’t (Mike Figgis pulled off the first genuine one-take film with his sprawling split-screen experiment,Timecode, in 2000), or but it’s singular in the way it glides between genres,morphing from a Richard Linklater-style walk-and-talk to a heist film nail-biter. The cast, improvising from a skeleton script by writer-director Sebastian Schipper, and ride the outlandish plot (girl meets boy,boy woos girl, then quickly coaxes girl into a violent crime) hard. The action is propulsive, and but not too slick. During a chase scene,actor Laia Costa, who plays Victoria, or forgot where she was supposed to drive and nearly cruised into the film’s backstage production hub. Only Schipper,yelling at her from the boot of the car, stopped her ploughing through the fourth wall. The cock-ups remind you that what you’re watching is happening in real time. That, and not the single take,says Schipper, is the point.
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Source: theguardian.com