Malina

For most movie fans, the annals of cinema contain mysterious territory, terra incognito, the work of directors renowned in other parts of the globe, but unknown in the United States, weird genres (for instance, rumba or rumberas melodramas in Mexico), experimental and avant-garde works,  In my case, I've read about the German director, Werner Schoeter, for many years, and seen glowing accounts of his work -- but, until yesterday, I've never seen one of his pictures.  On the evidence of Malina, released in 1990, I haven't been missing much.  On the other hand, it's rare that I actively detest a movie -- when a film fails for me, I'm generally indifferent to it.  Malina, which seems to me willfully confusing and obtuse and singularly rebarbative, actually angered me.  So, based on my strong negative reaction to the film, I'm forced to conclude that there was something about the picture which affected me strongly -- albeit in the wrong way.  I will probably have to see another few films by this director to get a more clear-eyed perspective on his work.  

Furthermore, Malina may not be representative of Schroeter's ouevre.  The picture adapts a novel by the German poet, Ingeborg Bachmann.  I have never warmed to Bachmann's poetry, work that seems both intentionally obscure and melodramatic to me.  She is like Sylvia Plath with a doctorate in Martin Heidegger's philosophy, not a good combination in my view.  (Bachmann was a drug addict and alcoholic; like the heroine in Malina, she chain-smoked in bed and managed to burn herself to death.)  Bachmann's book, regarded as difficult and fragmented even by Germans, was adapted by the Austrian Nobel prize-winner, Elfriede Jellinek, another writer that I can't tolerate.  Jellinek embodies the ice-cold cruelty and nihilism that characterizes Austrian literature and, indeed, the Viennese sensibility.  (You can observe this on display in the works of Thomas Bernhard, whom I admire because he is funny, and the films of Michael Haneke which are beautifully made and constructed, but, generally, completely heartless.)  Jellinek perceives everything through a lens of political and patriarchal oppression and insists on the ubiquity of all sorts of perversion, of course, most notably sexual.  Contemporary Austrian art is all delicious-looking cream bon-bons with fishhooks hidden in them.  

The film, Malina, is best regarded as a depiction of mental illness, advancing through mania and paranoia into full-blown schizophrenia.  The problem with this sort of picture (or novel) is that severe mental illness is not intrinsically dramatic or interesting -- schizophrenia is about as fascinating as stomach cancer.  Both are hideous diseases that don't mean anything and that can't (or shouldn't) be probed for allegory or political implications.  Being seriously ill is fundamentally tedious.  And representations of disabling mental illness are usually both exhausting and completely dull -- the nature of the sickness is that the victim is caught in loops of irrational thought, can't communicate in a meaningful way, and remains trapped in arid isolation; nothing about this is glamorous, romantic, or suspenseful.  The heroine's descent into madness, accordingly, in Malina is maddeningly repetitive and irritating -- the unnamed protagonist just keeps doing stupid and self-destructive things, harms everyone around her, and ends up so badly damaged that she just vanishes from the film:  in the book, she apparently disappears into a highly symbolic and programmatic crack in a wall.  (All of this was done better, and more efficiently, in Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher.)  Malina starts completely untethered and has nowhere to go from the outset -- the woman is already nuttier "than squirrel shit" as was said in The Good Lord Bird at the very outset and it's not illuminating to see her go f rom very bad to worse.

The first thing that should be said about Malina is that the name is not the title character. The madwoman is not given a name.  (She's played by Isabella Huppert who acted the part in French and, even, worked with French dialogue coaches but, then, was dubbed into German).  Malina is the madwoman's longsuffering boyfriend (modeled, apparently, on Max Frisch, the Austrian writer, with whom Bachmann lived from time to time.)  Malina is a patient rational guy who puts up with his girlfriend's bizarre conduct to the point that he becomes the villain of the piece.  Each time the woman does something horrible, he excuses her -- apparently, Malina has never heard of psychotherapy (odd since the story takes place in Vienna where this treatment was invented); he never seeks medical assistance of any kind, content to allow the woman to literally burn down their house --  in fact, Malina is the ultimate "enabler" to use jargon that I dislike but which is applicable here:  he seems to condone the madwoman's awful behavior for some unknown reason and does nothing at all to help her.  (It seems she needs a course of electro-convulsive therapy and, then, a regimen of psycho-active drugs).  Throughout the course of the movie, the protagonist smashes crate-loads of crockery, runs amuck on the streets of Vienna, gets so drunk she pukes in her purse, initiates a relationship with a man named Ivan who is sane enough to run like hell to get away from her.  She hallucinates all the time, visited by her awful Nazi papa and his zombie wife, apparently her mother.  Dad prances around with a swastika and a bull-whip and, at one point, lounges atop a mountain of ice in what seems to be a huge ice-cave in the Alps.  The woman hallucinates copulating couples everywhere and imagines a strange group of people who look like extras from Last Year in Marienbad -- they pose dramatically at the edge of the frame from time-to time, peering ghoulishly at something off-stage.  The woman is a writer like Ingeborg Bachmann and she is, forever, composing letters that she refuses to address.  A postal carrier hands her a letter at one point and the woman says:  "I prefer letters that you don't deliver", a remark that would be worthy of a baffled and comic reaction shot, but one that we don't get from the humorless duo of Jellinek and Schroeter.  The heroine thinks that it would be salubrious for her to get out of Vienna, a place with a nasty Gothic edge -- she spends her time in morbid-looking churches, horrible coffee-shops full of mutilated people, or cradling mummified dead children in some sort of crypt full of cadavers.  Out in the country, the heroine stays at a hunting chalet full of similarly mummified trophies -- someone has even stuffed a cat and the walls are studded with hundreds of antlers.  Our protagonist rewards her hosts by smashing to pieces their geraniums, wrecking her room, pitching more crockery around, and, then, gratuitously hacking their expensive-looking curtains to pieces.  Back in Vienna, she has a few unsatisfactory interviews with Ivan who wisely wants nothing to do with her.  She heaps up piles of paper in her spartan rooms -- by this time, she has driven away her long-suffering secretary, inexplicably called "Frau Jellinek"  Lighting the heaps of paper on fire, she rambles around in her apartment raving, and staggering between dozens of little fires, which, as is the nature of fire, grow into big bonfires. (The fire motif extravagantly developed in the film seems a heartless reference to Bachmann's fiery demise.)  A crack is threatening to drop the ceiling on her.  Malina, ever the rationalist, wanders amidst the crackling bonfires burning in the house admonishing his girlfriend to do better, but by this time the house is literally burning down.  The woman vanishes and Malina steps out of the fiery catacomb, closing the door on the oven of flames and the film ends.  

My account makes the picture seem more coherent than it is.  The whole film is completely untethered and full of episodes that I couldn't understand.  Schroeter starts the movie with a bang -- Ivan slaps the woman's face, threatens to hurl her off the parapet of a Viennese apartment building, and, than, pitches an enigmatic little girl (she seems to be the heroine when she was about ten) off the roof.  The little girl doesn't ever land.  Instead, we see the heroine cradling in her arms Malina who seems to have fallen from the building and smashed open his head.  This doesn't make any sense in any terms at all -- particularly since Malina is the film's sole survivor.  The movie is full of doublings, inexplicable imagery, and characters who appear, but may not really be physically present.  In one scene, zombies dance with glassy eyes while an opera singer in a ridiculous hat staggers around singing an aria -- Malina and the crazy woman dance for a while.  Huppert's performance is the kind of acting that critics call "brave" -- she never looks the same from scene to scene, is willing to play sequences without any make-up, and generally emotes up a storm running the gamut, as they say, from A to B since the part is thankless and requires her to simply behave hysterically from the beginning of the film to her final shot.  In 2008's Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman stages extended scenes with a woman who lives in a perpetually burning house -- everyone just ignores the flames which are always spiraling up back walls or flickering in foreground.  The scenes, although dire, are very funny -- the point is that some people thrive on crisis and hysteria and there is no more hysterical crisis than going about your business in a house that is on fire.  Kauffman seems to have got this idea from Malina.  But the imagery in Malina is so over-the-top that it's unintentionally funny -- Kauffman does better, he plays the scenes for comedy.  Another film that Malina resembles is Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965) in which the heroine gradually goes mad and ends up killing someone -- but Repulsion is infinitely better because it chronicles the woman's descent into madness.  In this film, the protagonist is crazy in the first shot and just as crazy more than two hours later when the movie ends.  

Peter Kern, one of my favorite German actors, has a puzzling cameo in the film -- he appears as a man with deep abscesses in his leg for whom the heroine purchases a plane ticket, apparently so she won't have to behold the weeping sores on his shins.  (I have no idea what this is supposed to mean but it's always good to see Peter Kern -- he's reliably amusing just like his compatriot Udo Kier.)  There's a good line about history.  The heroine says, apropos nothing as far as I can recall:  "History is the best teacher. Although unfortunately it has no students."