music friday: 1997
geezer cinema: twisters (lee isaac chung, 2024)

undine (christian petzold, 2020)

A friend recommended this, and I came to it cold ... knew nothing about it, never seen any movies from director Christian Petzold, knew none of the actors. It's one of my favorite ways to watch a new-to-me film, but I think I might have needed some context.

Undines are water nymphs ... the little mermaid is an example ... and I'm not sure if Petzold embellished the legend or not, but the titular Undine in his movie (played by Paula Beer) has some specifics related to love with a human. None of it was very clear to me, which is where context might have helped. At the beginning of the movie, when a man is breaking off a relationship with Undine, she says that means she must kill him, as if that's something everyone knows. I just went with it, knowing from the start that I'd be in the dark about the fantasy elements.

And it was an intriguing watch, no matter what I was missing. Beer is excellent, and Petzold creates an atmosphere that is a good blend of reality and mythology. Undine's relationships with men are both romantic and mysterious, thanks to the underlying myth, and if I never quite got the idea, I was able to go with it anyway. Undine is the kind of movie that often bothers me, yet for some reason this time I bought into what I was watching.

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