Malina (1991)

It's a strange verdict about a film, but after having seen Malina (Werner Schroeter), I have the feeling that the book is better. I haven't read it, but it must be. This is strange also because the screenplay of Malina was put together by Elfriede Jelinek, one of my favorite. authors. Obviously, making the film couldn't have been easy. How do you make a film that from the get-go takes place on some level of hallucination and/or distortion? A problem - or something that I perceived as a problem - was that you are immediately thrown into the world of the crazy protagonist, without every getting a real subjective sense of that world, except for a couple of scenes. Maybe I felt the film was too distant, or too literary (that it wasn't enough of a film, that it was too much an adaptation trying to be a film). The protagonist is a writer and/or an academic - at least that is what she thinks she is. In the beginning of the film we see her sitting at her desk, composing letters. Already then, we sense that a lot is wrong with this person. It is not as if I want a psychological diagnosis of what is wrong with her - that is the task of psychiatry, not film - but it seemed to me that I never got any deeper as to what was wrong with her. What I did suspect was that the movie (and the book?) is not only an exploration of mental illness, the form of mental illness is also a political state - we see the protagonist's father, a Nazi, and we easily think that the protagonist's delusions are not only a singular person's delusions. The film churned out more and more depictions of how the protagonist's world was falling apart, but I felt that these depictions did not bring much new in relation to the couple of scenes, in which we are already made to believe that the protagonist has a made-up lover, Malina, and a lover who might or might not be real, in some sense, Ivan. Maybe they are all just aspects of her imagination. The film lets us into a labyrinth of self-consciousness and imagination, but the problem I had was that I never was entirely engaged in snooping in the corners of this imagination. It all felt a bit - flat. To sum up: I wanted to like this movie, but throughout, I noticed I didn't care that much about what was going on. Still - I will definitively read Bachmann's book.