The Single-Take “Victoria” Is A Singular Achievement

It’s a sorry state of affairs when a foreign film’s best recourse to cut through the cacophonous blare of new releases in a given week is to highlight its central gimmick, as Victoria’s tagline boasts: “One girl. One city. One night. One take.” The single take that is indeed carried across the 138-minute runtime is a thoroughly impressive formal experiment, but there is considerably more to love here than the marketing strategy would initially suggest.

German actor-turned-director Sebastian Schipper delivers a solid heist movie centered on the eponymous Victoria (Laia Costa), a Spanish expat living in Berlin. An exuberant late night out at the club takes a nightmarish turn when Victoria takes up with a friendly group of local strangers and is caught up in a bank robbery gone wrong, unfolding in real time over the course of two hours.

It’s a purposefully slight plot, to accommodate the technical achievement of the film. But it’s a mistake to assume that this simplicity sacrifices narrative complexity. Schipper seizes upon the more precise rhythms allowed by the long take in order to dig deep into classic heist-movie tropes. Team-building is bucolic and languid, taking place in the wee hours of the morning as Victoria wanders the streets with a band of seemingly harmless Eurotrash ne’er-do-wells, Blinker (Burak Yigit), Boxer (Franz Rogowski), Fuss (Max Mauff), and Sonne (Frederick Lau). This goes on for nearly an hour before the criminal element kicks in, but this character development is vital: Just when we become invested in the protagonists’ effusive charms, the story kicks into high gear, and the pulse is breathless and nerve-wracking by comparison.

With a front end so deliberately paced, enjoyment of the whole relies on whether or not you can give yourself over to it right from the get-go, a lot of which rides on the shoulders of Costa’s performance. Some may take exception with her decision-making skills, but this belies the spontaneity with which such first-time meetings in a foreign city have a tendency to go. The language barrier, the boozy haze of post-bar-hopping exhilaration, the meet-cute butterflies between her and Sonne: It is very much a youthful European experience that happens to go too far, devolving into a heart-stopping final sequence. While Schipper, Costa, and company don’t quite stick the landing (and a stumble or two is understandable when one flies so high for so long), Victoria is, nevertheless, a singular accomplishment well worth a peek from behind white-knuckled fingers.