Undine

 Frederick de la Motte Fouque, notwithstanding his picturesque name, was a Prussian officer, known today for his 1811 novel, Undine.  The book was once wildly popular, counting luminaries like Edgar Alan Poe among its admirers.  E.T.A. Hoffmann adapted it as an opera, the first of several such works by Romantic composers.  I've read the book and it's an elaborate fairy tale about a nixie or water nymph who takes the form of a beautiful woman with a taste for handsome young noblemen.  The story is full of mysterious lakes, travels along the Rhine, castles, and enchanted wells.  The water nymph is haunted by her Uncle, a water spirit or elemental as well.  Men who betray her are drowned, at least, this is the original form of the story that derives from Teutonic folklore -- but in Fouque's version, the story is similar to Hans Christian Anderson's "Little Mermaid"; the poor nixie is the one that suffers the pangs of love and is betrayed by the prince who has sworn his troth to her.  

In modern day Berlin, a beautiful young woman named Undine Wibeau works at the Humboldt Forum where she leads tours highlighting urban renewal in the City both before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall.  She uses large plaster models of Berlin both under the Communists and, now, as a united city to illustrate her talks and lectures on changes that have been made and that will be implemented in the future.  One of her lectures is about the Berlin Palace, a former royal residence converted by the Communists into a modernist entertainment center with a swimming pool, theaters, and bowling alleys.  After the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the structure was, in fact, converted into the Humboldt Forum which is located in a completely restored version of the old royal palace.  The movie implies that the Markische Museum is right next door -- in fact, it's 1.4 miles away; the Markische Museum is the Museum of the City of Berlin.  The place, in my experience, never is open, or, at least, never fully open, and, in the Museum's isolated and empty cafe, Undine meets her married boyfriend.  He ditches her and she remarks:  "Now, I will have to kill you."  Entering the cafe after her cockroach boyfriend has skittered off, she encounters a burly industrial diver who is working on some kind of project at a lake an hour or so away by train.  When Undine sees the diver, a handsome fellow who has had his cleft palate repaired, a large aquarium in the cafe explodes and Undine is cut and drenched by the water pouring through the broken glass.  (The waiter in the cafe is weirdly angry at Undine and bans her from the cafe although she has done nothing untoward, except, perhaps, telekinetically register her passion for the handsome diver so as to shatter the aquarium and spill the goldfish all over the floor.  A small figurine of a diver in the aquarium falls to the cafe floor and Undine takes it as a souvenir.  The diver is working underwater welding at the bottom of a lake near a huge turbine -- it's a reservoir impounded by a big brick dam.  The diver sees Guenther, a legendary catfish, paddling around deep under water.  Guenther is huge and ugly.  The diver and Undine, being both watery creatures embark on a love affair.  One day, the diver takes Undine for a swim in the gloomy dark reservoir.  She slips out of her diving gear and we see her mask and flippers and flashlight sinking to the murky bottom of the lake.  The diver glimpses Undine swimming alongside big Guenther.  Undine seems to have drowned but the diver revives her and she seems perfectly fine, in fact, flirtatiously asking him to revive her again with mouth-to-mouth and chest compressions.  After a few weeks, Undine and the diver walking along the Spree, presumably between the Markische Museen and the Humboldt forum run into her former boyfriend who is back with his blonde wife.  The diver goes to the lake for more underwater welding, a strange image of glowing acetylene fire under water.  That night Undine receives a call from the diver in which he accuses her of faithlessness and says that he knows she has been with her old boyfriend, the married cad.  (The diver, who has really just begun his relationship with the beautiful woman, seems oddly hysterical.)  Undine is panicked by the call and the next morning hurries to the lake where she learns that the diver got caught in a turbine the previous afternoon -- that is, before the phone call -- and is lying in a hospital unconscious and brain dead.  She learns this from Monica, the diver's assistant, who secretly loves her boss.  Later, the diver wakes up crying Undine's name but it is too late -- she has vanished.  (Undine has killed her married boyfriend by drowning him in her swimming pool.)  Two years pass.  The diver is married to Monica, his assistant, and she is pregnant.  They visit the reservoir and, in the middle of the night, the diver sneaks out and swims in the dark waters where he briefly encounters Undine.  She hands him the figurine of the diver from the aquarium.  He surfaces and returns to his pregnant wife.

Christian Petzold's 2020 film is very handsome.  The scenes in Berlin are brightly lit and involve much voyeuristic spying and sneaking around.  Undine's lectures on housing, redevelopment, and monumental architecture in Berlin are rendered in some detail.  This aspect of the movie is puzzling but, I think suggests that Ostalgia (nostalgia for the old East Germany) is a submerged, but seductive aspect of recent German history.  Undine, the underwater creature, seems to be a figure somehow connected with the lost drowned world of the Communist DDR.  (We learn that part of the East Berlin cityscape exhibit has been put in another museum specializing in Ostalgia.)  The love scenes are compelling and the actress playing the nixie is exceptionally and luminously attractive -- her name is Paula Beer.  Old Gunther the catfish stands in for Undine's lake-spirit uncle in Motte Fouque's novel.  Submerged in the lake there is a sort of underwater palace, a kind of grotto of carved stone wreathed in seaweed. and marked with the word "UNDINE".  The movie is well-make and beautifully shot, but it's ultimately inconclusive, stitched together with disparate parts that don't quite fit.