Paula BEER Franz ROGOWSKI A Film by CHRISTIAN PETZOLD LOGLINE Undine works as a historian lecturing on Berlin’s urban development. But when the man she loves leaves her, the ancient myth catches up with her. Undine has to kill the man who betrays her and return to the water. DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT “You humans! You monsters!” Thus begins Ingeborg Bachmann’s narration “Undine Leaves”. Undine is the betrayed woman of the waters. According to the myth, she lives in a lake in the forest. A man who’s fatefully enamored with a woman, whose love is unrequited and hopeless, who no longer knows what to do with himself or his feelings, who suffers absolute despair... can enter the forest, go to the banks of the lake and cry out Undine’s name. And she’ll come. And love him. Their love is a pact that may never be betrayed. And if it is betrayed, then the man must die. Then it comes to pass that he who loves and is loved seems easy and free, lovable and desirable once more. In the myth, the previously hopelessly adored woman suddenly be- comes interested in the man again. And he leaves Undine to marry her, his first love. On the night of their wedding, Undine enters the bedroom and embraces the man in a bubble of water that’s going to drown him. “I wept him to death!” she stammers at the scuttling servants before disappearing into the lake in the forest. Our Undine is a city historian in Berlin, giving guided tours for the Senate Administration for Urban De- velopment. She has just been left and betrayed by someone whose name is Johannes. Going by the myth, she would take revenge on Johannes and kill him, but Undine defies the myth. She doesn’t want to return to the curse, to the lake in the forest. She doesn’t want to leave. She wants to love. She meets someone else. And it’s this love story that Undine tells. Christian Petzold ABOUT THE FILM Undine (Paula Beer) works in Berlin as a historian thinks she has no choice – until in the moment of and guide to the city‘s development. She has a betrayal, she meets Christoph (Franz Rogowski), small apartment at Alexanderplatz, a master‘s an industrial diver, and unexpectedly falls for him. degree in history, and a freelance contract. But This is a new, happy and innocent love filled with underneath the appearance of her modern city life curiosity and trust. But when Christoph starts to lurks an old myth: if the man Undine loves betrays feel that Undine is running away from something, her, she has to kill him and return to the water she she has to face her curse once and for all. She once came from. So when her lover Johannes (Jacob doesn‘t want to lose this love. Matschenz) leaves her for another woman, Undine INTERVIEW OF CHRISTIAN PETZOLD ABOUT THE FILM UNDINE Your more recent films all had explicit historical or political backgrounds. With Undine you chose fairytale-material as your point of departure. I don’t know if you can really differentiate so com- pletely. Undine is a story about love, as are Barbara, Phoenix and Transit. But they tell of an impossible love, or a damaged one, or one that perhaps evolves. This time I wanted to make a film in which you see how love develops and remains. And there’s no such thing as an unpolitical story. The political always slips into the narrative. What’s your connection to the Undine material? At some point in the 90s I read Peter von Matt’s book “Romantic Treachery – The Faithless in Literature”, which has a chapter about the undine myth, and the idea of betrayed love interested me. I knew the undine story from my childhood, but I always remember everything incorrectly. Maybe that’s a prerequisite for writing scripts – a faulty memory, like false testimony... What I did remember well was the sentence undine calls out to the servants of the faithless man whom she has killed: “I wept him to death.” I always like that line of Fouqué’s. That memory got mixed up with other versions, Lortzing’s or Hans-Christian Andersen’s, “The Little Mermaid”, where the same motif takes on a differ- ent form, and at some stage I also read Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Undine Leaves”. I liked the way it’s the Undine who speaks rather than some narrator or man. It’s a woman talking. You could make a film like that, I thought. One that’s about the undine or the undine’s despair. The curse in Ingeborg Bachmann is that men are never faithful because they basically only love themselves. And the breaking of this curse from a female perspective struck me as the right narrative approach; that our undine doesn’t want to go back to the forest lake. That she doesn’t want to kill. There’s a man, Christoph, who’s the first to love her for herself, and it’s a love she’ll fight for. had grown organically in order to build a new flooded valley where a village once stood. Below is center that won’t grow but is dictated. You get the this mysterious, hidden life, the old stories, and sense that railway fanatics gone mad are planning above is modernity, steel – yet both are in the same the Potsdamer Platz. And beneath, in the water, space. That’s how I wanted to construct the story. you can still feel remains of the old magic. It has In the same space. And these cursed creatures, the this Jules Verne character to it, the adventure, the stuff of fairy tales and myths who go about their people welding underwater in a city that actually mischief down below, feature as remnants in the film. went under at this spot. Do you consider Undine a fairytale figure? Your lake is not an enchanted one in the woods We already spoke about Ghosts. The ghost films but rather a reservoir somewhere between ro- are about ghosts who want to become human. manticism and industrialization. The terrorists in The State I Am In want to be fathers The lake we filmed at is near Wuppertal, the region and mothers, they want to have a life. Maybe that’s Did you work your way through all the countless that this, these destroyed pasts, these myth-rem- where I grew up. The Wupper is a river that marks a the underlying theme in all of my films… And maybe versions of the Undine story? nants, are part of our undine story. boundary, a Styx of the industrial age. It’s where you can say that Undine is a fairytale figure who No. The fairy tales you remember, the myths that Thyssen originated – a small smithy on the Wupper wants to become human. And we watch her realize were read to you by your mother – you don’t have In your film Ghosts you focused on the fairytale- that became a global corporation because it copied this dream. She’s already human, she wants to re- to reread these. Their world view is stored in your like aspect of berlin – making the tiergarten what at the time was the best steel in the world, main human. When she goes diving with Christoph, memory, and when it comes to writing a story, I behind potsdamer platz seem enchanted. Swiss “blue steel”, and was able to produce it much she suddenly vanishes as if the water were pulling find blurring and clear spots extremely important. The comparison with Ghosts is interesting, it’s also more cheaply here. The industry needed a lot of her into her element – she remembers nothing and The condensation, the abridgement, all that is in based on a fairytale, the Brothers Grimm’s “The energy, so all the Wupper’s tributaries are now says, “No, I don’t want to come back here again”. the narration. The fairytales that were recorded by Burial Shirt”: A child who has died slips out of his dammed for energy or drinking water. And since But the cursed/enchanted world, the mythical world, the Brothers Grimm and so on had been passed on grave every night to sit down with his mother and the industrial age, at the beginning of which they won’t let go. It sticks to her, it’s brutal, it pulls her orally, being told and retold, and, at some point, say, “You have to stop crying for me, otherwise I were built, hadn’t yet developed its own aesthetic, under… The myths and fairytales, men’s myths, leave changing more and more. But a few things remained cannot die”. But the fairytale doesn’t appear in the the structures often look like old churches. It con- Undine a pitiful dearth of leeway. Undine is a woman the same. To me, cinema is more akin to this oral film. It might feature in the little lake in the Tiergar- tains both the dammed water, that energy, and a who needs to escape the work of male projection. tradition than it is to research in the state library. ten that was designed by Lenné – like Fouqué, he too was a romantic. But something happened to the Your Undine is a city historian in berlin, a city city between 2004, when we shot Ghosts, and now. that your film repeatedly shows in an unusual History is changing, as are the legends and myths.