Mark Reviews Movies: UNDINE (2021)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 3, 2021

There's a lot happening beneath the surface (No pun intended) of Undine, writer/director Christian Petzold's eventually fantastical story of the romance between a historian and an industrial diver. The movie, which is about the mystery of the true nature of one character and the intensity of the love between this couple, is itself a bit too much of a mystery. Petzold hints at so much underlying significance—involving history, architecture, serendipity, myth, and a giant catfish—that the story and the characters themselves remain a distant, if intriguing, enigma.

Petzold seems to be working primarily with and from feeling here. There's an occasionally tantalizing sense of intuition to the filmmaking, both in terms of what the director is doing and how he clearly wants us to react to the material. He puts forth a series of pieces—in terms of the dialogue, a lecture or two or three about the history of Berlin, some odd coincidences, a few visual motifs, etc.—and expects us to assemble the full picture and its meaning. By the end, though, we mostly realize there's just enough hollowness to this story, these characters, and these ideas that the final portrait has a few too many gaps.

The tale begins with the eponymous Undine (Paula Beer), a woman of striking beauty, deep knowledge, and, despite her understated attitude, fierce passion. We suspect the last quality from the movie's opening scene, in which Undie has been dumped at a café by her boyfriend Johannes (Jacob Matschenz). He's trying to be direct about the end of their relationship, but Undine is in denial.

There's a game of words when Johannes tells his now-ex that she should have expected it. He did, after all, say that he wanted to "meet," not, as he usually would, that he wanted to "see" her. She argues that he said "see," but listening to his voicemail and being proven incorrect, she finally accepts.

Undine also makes a pretty unmistakable threat, although she states it as if it's more an inevitability. Because Johannes has dumped her, he needs to die. She has to kill him.

Whether or not she makes good on her threat/promise/statement-of-fact is, strangely, almost irrelevant. Undine goes back to work across the street and watches from a window to see if Johannes will take the second chance she has given him. Her job, by the way, is as a lecturer at an institute for the architectural history of Berlin. This matters, because Petzold gives the character multiple opportunities to provide a history lesson on the evolving state of the city, from its age of palaces, to its post-war divide, and to its post-reunification plans for expansion/reconstruction. For his part, the director's camera lingers on scale models of the city while Undine speaks of various buildings and features.

As for why any of this matters to this story, that's one of those mysteries that needs to be deduced from the material. One vital theme, perhaps, is stated pretty bluntly by Undine, while discussing an old palace that was rebuilt in a different place as a museum: No matter what is done, there is little possibility for real change.

Is that, perhaps, the point of Undine's next relationship? While looking for Johannes at the café after her presentation, she's met by Christoph (Franz Rogowski), an industrial diver who listened to her lecture and followed her. Their romance starts and escalates quickly, as if all of that stuff with Johannes is a distant, forgotten, and irrelevant memory. Things just go on, as they probably did with the other man—lots of conversation, long embraces, hand-holding, and moments of intimacy in bed together.

A similar thought comes from their first meeting, when Christoph accidentally bumps into a shelf, breaking an aquarium sitting atop it. Later on, Undine returns to the café, discovering that the aquarium has been replaced, and it's almost as if the breaking and all of that time in between then and now don't matter. This couple, by the way, has a quirky knack for breaking things, only for them to be repaired or replaced later. There's another idea, noticed and felt, for sure, but still remaining just out of reach beyond that.

Most of the story revolves around the romance, which is both lovely (The two actors display undeniable chemistry, which is itself a mystery of acting) and shallow. Undine speaks in those riddles about history and architecture, while Christoph latches on to her like an adoring puppy. He loves her, Christoph professes, but Undine never says the same. Is he just a distraction for her, while she works through the break-up, or is there more to this beautiful, quiet, and unfathomable woman? What, after all, is in a name, anyway?

The story begins with Undine, as she goes through her break-up and rebounds with this doting new lover, and even though the tale ultimately belong to Christoph, it remains about the mysterious woman—more an object of deep passion, hopeless romance and inscrutable meaning than anyone or, for that matter, anything human. The same, in a way, could be said of Undine itself.

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