There's Nothing Like Watching Young Women Steal Babies, Do Coke, and Be Wild

Young people—we're wild! We're experimenting, we're taking drugs, we're moving to Berlin to figure out the next steps in our artistic careers even though we don't speak any German. We're going to nondescript underground dance clubs where people are wearing interesting outfits, we're staying up really late when we have to work in a few hours, we're agreeing to leave the club with a group of strange guys who all have fake criminal-sounding names like Blinker and Foot, the origins of which we will never learn. We're shoplifting beers from convenience stores and drinking them on the roof. We're having romantic getting-to-know-you conversations at five in the morning, and then somehow before we know it we're stealing a mini-van and €50,000 from a bank and borrowing someone else's baby to look less suspicious as we're sneaking past the police who have cornered us in an apartment complex because we stole a mini-van and €50,000 from a bank!

Shot in real time with a single, 138-minute take, Sebastian Schipper's new film Victoria is a frantic portrayal of youth gone the way particularly hysterical parents might imagine it. The film takes place in notoriously hard-partying Berlin from the hours of 4:30 to 7 AM, and it begins with the eponymous Victoria running into a group of guys—Sonne (Sun), Blinker, Boxer, and Fuss (Foot)—as she's leaving a smoky, techno-y club. She tries to bike away because she has to open the café in the morning, but one of the guys (Sonne) is flirty and encourages her to join them for some more of the night.

Beers and the roof ensue, followed by a tender moment between Sonne and Victoria in the darkened café where she works. The night could have ended there, with Victoria sleepily wondering if she would ever see Sonne again, but instead she's introduced to the dark side: Boxer owes someone money for doing him a favor while he was in prison, and he has to pay it back by robbing a bank, tonight. Victoria is enlisted as the getaway driver of the mini-van stolen for these purposes, and the group proceeds through great peril and anxiety for the rest of the film. There are a lot of grave and frightened faces, someone takes too much coke, and they really do steal a baby!

I told myself I would stop using the word harrowing in reviews of suspenseful narratives, but I feel comfortable quoting an email my friend sent me about this movie: "Make sure to see it in a theater if you can, not on a laptop! I thought it was really good—really HARROWING. Maybe you should write about it for Broadly??" I saw it on a laptop and tried to go to sleep afterwards; both were mistakes.

As was the decision that predicates the entire film, I suppose, though Victoria never seems to regret choosing to go along with these guys. I'm trying to think of times I've willfully hung out with (male) strangers I've met at bars or clubs and can come up with nothing. If this would make sense anywhere, it's in Berlin, but even so, I spent most of the film assuming Victoria was going to be raped or murdered or both. Speaking with Rolling Stone, the actress who plays Victoria, Laia Costa, agrees. "If I were Victoria for real, the first time [the German guys] say, 'You want a beer?' I would say, 'No, sorry.' No story at all." Yet the movie doesn't seem totally ridiculous, and that's enough. Parts of Victoria are medium-to-wildly implausible, but it didn't stop me from enjoying the film: Implausibility is only a valid criticism when the other aspects of a work fail. Besides, the number of times Victoria takes down and reassembles her ponytail because of stress and exercise feels exactly right.

Interviewing Schipper and Costa at Gawker, Rich Juzwiak also notes that he expected Victoria to be raped throughout the entire film. "I expected Victoria to get punished," Juzwiak says. "From the beginning, I thought she was setting herself up to get raped." The Europeans respond that this must be a "cultural thing"—"But the guys are so sweet!" Costa adds—but later, in an "outtake" posted in the comments, Schipper elaborates on what was probably a decision on his part: "You know I hate it when directors misuse their powers. They show you this really beautiful girl and the next moment she gets raped." While the film's actual ending isn't necessarily happy, the punishment Juzwiak and I were waiting for throughout never comes to the female protagonist, who somehow manages to come off as neither victimized nor bad. She's vulnerable: She's just moved to the city from her native Spain, where she spent years studying to be a concert pianist until she was finally told she wasn't good enough to go pro. (We get to see her play as well; it's incredible.) This is probably why, it's sort of implied, she decides to go with the guys—maybe she's drifting; maybe she's intentionally trying to get herself out of her rut by saying "yes" to whatever comes her way.

But she's also never pitiable, nor is she overbearing. In fact, it's the men who often cause problems—they're loud, they're aggressive, they scare people they need to get things from—while Victoria's calm control keeps the group from collapsing a couple of times: once when Blinker has a panic attack after taking too much coke, and once when she needs to borrow the baby, from a couple whose apartment she and Sonne break into in order to hide from the cops now on their tails. (The men are simultaneously very scared of being caught and very bad at preventing themselves from being caught; the most egregious example of this comes when they commit the robbery and then return to club where they met Victoria to celebrate, except the second time Blinker and Boxer get naked.)

Despite the preponderance of men—including the director and camera operator, Sturla Brandth Grøvlen—the film really is about Victoria, or at least about her experience; Schipper doesn't use her to tell Boxer's prison story (you never get that) or plop her into Sonne's life as the manic pixie dream girl. (When Sonne touches her ass, she demands he say sorry "with the heart." Much of the dialogue was improvised, and the banter is very natural.) Victoria's youthful antics will probably catch up with her—in her interview at Gawker, Costa says there's "no way" Victoria will get caught, but that seems crazy; ultimately, as Joan Didion says in "Goodbye to All That," "some things are in fact irrevocable." I imagine she'd be identified by the young mother whose baby she steals, if not by security cameras, etc. But it's weirdly nice to think of her getting punished for committing a crime, rather than for being a woman.