Undine

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. So when her lover Johannes (Jacob Matschenz) leaves her for another woman, Undine thinks she has no choice – until in the moment of betrayal, she meets Christoph (Franz Rogowski), an industrial diver, and unexpectedly falls for him. This is a new, happy and innocent love filled with curiosity and trust. But when Christoph starts to feel that Undine is running away from something, she has to face her curse once and for all. She doesn‘t want to lose this love. Undine is a film by award-winning German filmmaker Christian Petzold.  

In his director's statement, Petzold says:

“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." 

If you are captivated by myths, mysteries and love fairytales, Undine is a combination of all three. While set in a realistic setting in Berlin, this story unfolds in so many mysterious ways captivating the audience act by act. Its surprise ending is the perfect culmination of the love drama triangle. It is like a modern "Little Mermaid" story but in an adult and more realistic way. It is like putting a puzzle together and trying to make the pieces of the story fit, intrigued and guessing to its plot until the very last scene. It is a film I absolutely recommend. 

"...And maybe you can say that Undine is a fairytale figure who wants to become human. And we watch her realize this dream. She’s already human, she wants to remain human. When she goes diving with Christoph, she suddenly vanishes as if the water were pulling her into her element – she remembers nothing and says, “No, I don’t want to come back here again”. But the cursed/enchanted world, the mythical world, won’t let go. It sticks to her, it’s brutal, it pulls her under… The myths and fairytales, men’s myths, leave Undine a pitiful dearth of leeway. Undine is a woman who needs to escape the work of male projection," says the director. 

"...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," continues Petzold. 

Motifs relating to the Undine myth can already be found back in Greek mythology. The word “Undenae” appears for the first time in a script of Paracelsus published posthumously in 1566: Undine – from the Latin unda, “wave”, is a water sprite in human form who can only attain an immortal soul through marriage to a human. Should she come back into contact with her element after her marriage, she must return to it. Should her husband remarry, he must die.

Undine will be released in select theaters and on VOD platforms on June 4, 2021.