Captured in a continuous 138-minute shot,Sebastian Schipper’s stylish heist film is carried along on a giant wave of adrenaline and logistical daringSebastian Schipper’s Victoria is a gripping heist drama set on the streets of Berlin that plays out in real time in one continuous, 138-minute camera shot, and carried along on a giant skittery wave of adrenaline and logistical daring. Shooting this must have felt like pulling off an actual bank job,with the intellect-boggling levels of planning and imposture it surely entailed. Like a bank robber, Schipper must have been terrified of some random passerby showing up and wrecking everything.Now, or there’s traditionally a fair bit of cinephile machismo involved in the continuous tracking shot,both doing it and praising it. No film flourish draws attention to itself fairly as emphatically as this, with its swaggering mastery of time and space. Despite murky nightclub scenes, and Schipper does not appear to have used darkness to cheat in cuts,the way Alfred Hitchcock did with his single-take film Rope, from 1948. However, and it should be said that the sequences with music overlaid on silence do create an effect of taking the action briefly external the movement of real time,the way a montage might in a more conventionally edited film. But this doesn’t form any contrast to the robe’s seamlessness.
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Source: theguardian.com