维多利亚

《装腔指南》P234

我的译文：《维多利亚》

一个女孩在柏林的夜总会跳着舞。她是西班牙人，20来岁，美得足够亮瞎周边破败的环境(她的笑靥引人微笑)。她很开心，或特别想开心。但形单影只难免寂寞，她试着跟那个时髦的酒吧招待搭讪，可惜他不感冒。因为第二天她还要去上班，不得不离开酒吧，这时她遇到了一群可爱的柏林底层人物，领头的是个彬彬有礼的索内人。这是《维多利亚》(2015年)的开场几分钟，其情节最终导致同名女主角被卷入一场武装抢劫，并带来毁灭性的后果。

叙述是狄更斯式的。就如同是《雾都孤儿》(Oliver Twist)中那个场景的延伸版，天真的主人公在伦敦游荡，发现他的新朋友们不是只会玩游戏。这般说来，这部电影似乎看没什么大不了。但是，当你知道它是用一个完整的镜头拍摄完成的——在148分钟的拍摄时间里，摄影师一直跟随演员们在柏林溜达——你便会相信这里有一些特别的东西。近来，这类“一镜到底”的电影流行起来，在电脑成像花样百出的时代给人一种真实的感受。但在维多利亚的故事中，它很适合正在讲述的故事，并非只是一个噱头：试想一个女孩发现自己陷入了一段无法下车的旅程，令人眩晕的恐惧不断叠加，直到几乎无法忍受。这很适合导演塞巴斯蒂安·席佩尔(Sebastian Schipper)和剧组要求拍摄出的角色的冒险精神。据席佩尔说，他只能负担得起三次尝试。前两个都失败了。“没有备退路”，他在演员们第三次尝试之前告诉他们必须全心投入，他催促道：“去感受，去恐惧！”这番话发挥了作用。

《维多利亚》是一个关于浪漫和暴力的故事，但让它效果显著的原因之一是，这些元素都没有一个是明确的。被克制的浪漫只局限在两个人物相互爱慕的视线中。暴力也是通过暗示去体会而非直接展现出来的。在所有即兴表演的氛围中(一开始演员们的剧本只有几页长)，有一个精明的帮手在起作用。完成的电影仅持续两个多小时，但它似乎容纳一生的光阴。它做到了一些大片很少能做到的事情，为你呈现你会关心的也会想念的角色。它的浓缩和简练使它像宝石一样珍贵，这是长篇电视剧无论有多少优点都无法做到的。它做到只有电影才能做到的。

原文 P234

《How to sound cultured》-Victoria

A girl dances in a Berlin nightclub. She is Spanish, 20-something, and sufficiently pretty(her smile makes you want to smile) to light up her seedy surroundings. She’s having a good time or trying to. Alone, a little lonely, she attempts to chat up the hipster barman but he’s not interested. Then,, as she’s leaving, because she has to go to work the next day, she falls in with a group of likeable Berliner low-lifes, led by the courteous Sonne. These are the opening few miutes of Victoria(2015), whose plot eventually sees the eponymous heroine being roped into an armed robbery, with devastating consequences.

The narrative is Dickensian. It’s like an extended version of that scene in Oliver Twist when the naive hero, on the loose in London， realises that his new friends are doing more than playong games. And put like that, the movie may not sound so remarkable. But when you learn that it was filmed in one unbroken shot-the cameraman doggedly following the actors around Berlin for the entirely of its 148-minute running time- you may be more inclined to believe there is something special here. The ‘one shot’film has recently become trendy, promising an aura of truth in an era of CGI rckery, yet in the case of Victoria it’s more than a gimmick. It’s approapriate to the tale being told, of a girl who finds herself on a ride she can’t get off, the vertiginous fear growing until it becomes almost unbearble. And it also seems fitting that her character’s risk-taking was mirrored by the director, Sebastian Schipper, and his crew and cast. According to Schipper, he could only afford to try the experiment three times. The first two were dud. “There is no plan B”, he told his actors before their third attempt. ‘Give them your heart, ‘ he urged.  ‘Feel it. Be afraid.’ The pep talk seems to have worked.

Victoria is story of romance and violence, but one of the things that makes it so effective is that neigher of those elements is explicit. The romance is restrained, limited to the sight of two characters who above all seem to like each other. The violence too is understated, suggested rather than shown. For all the air of improvisation(the script the actors started with was just a few pages long), there’s a canny hand at work. The finished film barely lasts more than two hours but it seems to accommodated a lifetime. It does something that blockbusters rarely manage, presenting you with characters you care about and will miss. Its contained concentration and concision make it gemlike in a way that long-form TV drama, for all its virtues, can never be. It does things that only a film can.