As If We Were Dreaming It
Christian Petzold returns to the present and bids a full farewell to realism in Undine, a fantasy-tinged, modern-day fairy tale that grafts the vicissitudes of Berlin city planning onto an uncharacteristically chirpy romance. Although fate is still predetermined to rear its head, the resultant romantic swoon lacks the same weight it carried in the German director’s period-set Barbara (2012), Phoenix (2014), and Transit (2018), an impeccable international breakthrough trilogy in whose long shadow Undine struggles to make its own, typically intelligent ideas about love and history shine. If Petzold’s ninth feature feels more of a quirky transition than a fully realized new direction, it still functions as an excellent primer for his directorial interests, as the various novelties on display are continually bolstered and enriched by past concerns, motifs, and even individual images.
Undine’s key elements are laid out in its opening minutes. Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) meets Undine (Paula Beer) at the café in front of the museum where she works and splits up with her; shaken but resolute, she informs him that he must die if he leaves her. She enters the museum to give a presentation, moving between the different models of Berlin on display and explaining the various ideologies they embody, although her distraction is made evident when the part of one model showing the museum briefly gives way to a bird’s-eye view of Johannes waiting outside in real life. But when Undine rushes back to the café, he’s gone. A fish tank complete with a diver figurine among the weeds catches her eye in the café, just as Christoph (Franz Rogowski) enters and shyly compliments her on her presentation. As the tank begins to buckle and sway, Undine pulls Christoph out of the way as the water bursts outwards and engulfs the couple, bringing them literally together on the floor in a bizarre meet-cute of shattered glass and gasping goldfish.
Christoph himself turns out to be a diver who is currently fixing underwater turbines at a dam outside of Berlin, his work occasionally interrupted by the big catfish that lives in the lake. Undine takes the train to visit him there, and even joins him underwater when a bedroom scene segues into a dive that could easily be a dream. “Undine” is seen etched on a submerged column that is also adorned with a heart, before she sheds mask, flippers, and torch to swim along with the catfish, her body eventually floating up to the surface against the sunlight from above in what might be the most purely fantastical image of Petzold’s career.
The diver figurine makes a suitable parting gift for Christoph to give to Undine as she returns to Berlin. Once reunited there, the zenith of their burgeoning romance is reached when she performs for him a presentation on the Berlin City Palace that she will deliver the next day, her critical remarks about the dubious need to create a perfect reconstruction of an historical building at the start of the 21st century punctuated
