1991 Directed by Werner Schroeter
A complex and enigmatic plot that evokes the life of Bachmann. The story develops around an unusual triangular relationship, a threesome between a woman of unknown name, a man named Malina and a Hungarian, Ivan, with whom she falls in love. Ivan will be his last great love, but their need for exclusivity in love is so strong that it can not be understood or matched. Malina is a struggle, a confrontation between two worlds strange and hostile.
Going into this film I didn't know anything about it other than the fact that it stars the great Isabelle Huppert. And star in it she does - she essentially is the film. She's in practically every scene. It's a real powerhouse performance and it needs to be because the dreamlike stream of conscious narrative that the film is based on is obtuse to say the least. The opening scene sets the tone nicely - intense and surreal. Destructive relationships and the deconstruction of the characters appears to be the point of it all. Huppert's psychotic performance carries this off nicely. It's never really clear exactly what is going on - what is real or imagined, if the characters even…
An oppressively disjointed narrative takes a ruthless haphazard shape in "Malina", Werner Schroeter’s symbolic and ablaze adaptation of Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann’s 1971 cult novel by the same name about a nameless "writer's" path to self-immolation while her surroundings and consciousness come together with her delusions and fragmented identity.
Schroeter heightens the already monstrous magnitude of the emotional frenzy with discomforting visual compositions. Frantic disintegration derails out of control in the framing of dual imagery through mirroring and expands via ceaseless flames that cloud the images and scorches a broken psyche.
Cinema of self-destruction at its most disorienting, complex, and erratic. Undeniably one of a kind. Absolutely essential for Huppert stans. Isabelle is in a league of her own.
An influential figure for his better-known New German Cinema colleagues such as Fassbinder, Herzog and Syberberg, Werner Schroeter once opined that "there are only high points in my films." He wasn't kidding—at least not based on this Ingeborg Bachmann adaptation written by Elfriede Jelinek, the Nobel Prize–winning author of the novel on which Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) is based. Bold and baffling, surreal and operatic, provocative and beautiful, this volatile love story seems to move according to the associative logic of a dream, often visualizing its characters' extreme impulses in the most excessive and expressive of manners. Striking shot by Schroeter's longtime cinematographer Elfi Mikesch, and featuring the great Isabelle Huppert at her creative best, Malina is certainly one of the more unique films ever made about writers.
you didn’t see my valentine
i sent it via pantomime
or alternatively:
destroy everything you touch today
please destroy me this way
a film scraped from all the new jagged mirrors brought into this world by shattering a single one. to have a self, to be as expected is mania.
"I'm not Christ. I can't save you."
"But you look like him."
Malina takes everything that was bubbling under the surface in The Piano Teacher and finally lets it erupt on screen: despair, denial, auto-destruction. The film isn't really about anything other than our unnamed protagonist, despite everything else going on. It's a lurid and suffocating perspective, made more arresting by Schreoter's compositions (formal enough to seem deliberate, restrained enough to seem uncanny). Huppert seems to be acting in a different realm, feverish instead of the ice cold we know her for. Despite the intensity and spectacle of it all, there's still a level of misunderstood self-possession, which leaves the narrator indeterminable to the audience, but much more alluring.
I'll need to rewatch this at a moment where it won't make me feel unwell. It's a bit like being trapped in a burning house.
وداع
سنكون في منأىً عن بعضنا
فلا تحايا بيننا مُجابة
ولا كلمات تستحقّ المُبادلة
كذلك الجرثوم تحت الزجاج
والأرنب الذي مات تحت التشريح
مُنتفضٌ ومُسمّمٌ وعاجزٌ عن الاستغاثة بأيّ آلهة
هؤلاء هم رفاقي
أسعى لأجل كل المظلومين والمُرهقين والمُستنفدين
الزجاج المنبوذ، الملابس الرخيصة
والمنازل المحترقة التي تعوي صوب السماء
أصطفّ مع الُمهمَلين
فكلّ هؤلاء هم أشباهي
يُحسنون إلينا
يُكوّموننا معًا، يمنحوننا الثقة
ويحملوننا إلى مكانٍ آخر
صالحٌ هو ذلك المكان
حيث لا ينالنا إلا الموت
أرنبٌ أبكم، قملةٌ مسحوقة وقلبٌ مبارك
يعجز الخوف المجرّد من أن يبلغنا
وهو يرتدي ثوب الإحسان.
إنغبورغ باخمان
“With my burned hand, I write of fire.”
A confusing yet interesting plot that emits high intensity imagery and drama from start to end. Despite not possessing appealing qualities of your bog standard film, the dialogue and performances make this a film you can’t take your eyes away from even if you want to. Didn’t resonate with me as much as I thought it would but I saw the beauty in this for sure and Isabelle Huppert is simply stellar in her performance and that final scene is pretty breathtaking.
Watched on Mubi.
girl who has only seen possession, watching her second movie: getting a lot of possession vibes from this…
"I'm also Malina and Malina is me"
Somewhat akin to a good taste© Possession, Schroeter's unhinged romance shatters the psyche through free associative love that manifests in all encompassing destruction. Huppert pursued by an eternal Trouble-Will-Find-Me atmosphere, the disputes, internal and external, an act in vacated spaces dominated by lingering resentments. Strolls scored by the weeping strings of the wandering violinist, omnipresent mirrors a ricochet of escalating mania that weaponize the projection as an attack on the bearer.
Huppert bellows an operatic obsession in the form of a love triangle but it's written in the endless turmoil of a circle, its starts and ends the same ruination that lays the bricks for the walled apocalypse. In the absence of identity there's little more to do that plead with the reflection while all the memoirs burn, as Malina turns animal, anima, animus, all - the ultimate act of creativity the one that annihilates everything.
