Die tödliche Maria (1993)

Director:

Tom Tykwer

Writers:

Tom Tykwer (screenplay)
Tom Tykwer (story)

Release Date:

3 February 1994 (Germany)

Genre:

Drama | Thriller | Fantasy

Plot:

This dark psychological thriller draws us slowly but surely into Maria's strange world. Tension mounts...

Plot Keywords:

Letter | Housewife | Expressionist | Soap | Telephone Call

Awards:

9 wins

Cast

Nina Petri	...	Maria
Katja Studt	...	Maria (16 years)
Juliane Heinemann	...	Maria (10 years)
Josef Bierbichler	...	Marias Father
Péter Franke	...	Heinz
Jean Maeser	...	Heinz (Age 26)
Joachim Król	...	Dieter
Rolf Peter Kahl	...	Juergen
Renate Usko	...	Mrs. Dahlbach
Georg Winterfeld	...	Ernst
Tom Spiess	...	Bernhard
Andreas Petri	...	First Aid
Nada Daniels	...	Lydia
Ortwin Spieler	...	First Doctor
Peter Hommen	...	Second Doctor

Also Known As:

Deadly Maria

Runtime:

106 min

Country:

Germany

Language:

German

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

1.33 : 1

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

Germany:16 | Hong Kong:IIB | Spain:18 | Sweden:15

Filming Locations:

Berlin, Germany

Company:

Liebesfilm

Movie Connections:

Features Es geschah am hellichten Tag (1958)

Early Tykwer -- fine craft, self-indulgent freudian script

Given the excitement and the exhilarating surprises of Tykwer's subsequent work, this early film is a rude, depressing surprise, a claustrophobic brooding piece obsessively focused on hopelessness. Tykwer's craft in cinematography and direction is evident, but his script is one that might have been put together by a movie-bedazzled Goth high school student.

Yes, cinema can transform realities, altering time and transforming today's listless oppressed housewife back into her avatars as tentative child or as wide-eyed adolescent tasting a first, unexpected kiss; it can magic the lean young suitor into the indifferent, casually arrogant husband of later years; and it can change the powerful father into a bed-ridden, harsh demanding child. And as Tykwer demonstrates, letters become flashbacks, an inanimate statute has its own point of view, and dreams deliver incomprehensible alterations of reality.

But -- every character in this depressing story is progressively degraded in the telling of events that develop in confusing fashion over 25 years. The setting is a dark, depressing apartment building from which little of the action escapes; when Maria goes out to shop, the camera follows her gaze down toward her feet, rarely looking outward. Tentative, stuttering Dieter (Joachim Krol) lives downstairs, hemmed in by towering piles of crumbling newspapers and books, so that rather than offering the escape we wish for Maria (for we do, despite it all, hope for her to open finally and to take flight), he is no more than one more suffocating prisoner of the gloomy lower middle class German tenement.

And then the freudian symbolism, please -- this is the most arrant pseudo-psychological indulgence. Dark, dark, dark. The African statuette, phallus shaped, hiding place for Maria's paltry hoard, with dream powers to impregnate; the obsession with the frustration of sexuality; Maria's hoarding of letters to herself; messy rebirth, menstrual flow and vomiting; her intent killing of common household insects that she collects in a closed display box; and Tykwer's familiar confusion of falling and flight.

About halfway through the viewing, the surprises of time manipulation lose their charm and the film becomes increasingly "laengweilig" -- not "boring," the usual translation, but literally drawn-out in time, as if the resolution will never come. It does -- but there is little satisfaction and not much hope in this ending, which literally throws Maria and Dieter together, on the ground, in the grim courtyard of the building.

This film, available in Germany in VHS only, is one for the obsessionists who must own or know ALL of Tykwer. It's a waste of at least two fine actors (Petri and Krol). We can be thankful that Tykwer got most of this out of his system and survived somehow as a film maker despite it.