Malina

(Unknown literary source.) Postmodern in form and substance, the film is a brilliant study of the subjectivity of the main protagonist - or rather, "protagonists." Huppert's character is split within herself towards the remaining two characters, becoming inseparable from them - if she loses the mediating role of one of them, she also loses herself. The feminist motif is also evident - both of the remaining characters are men. The protagonist doesn't directly reflect on this decentralization of herself and her dissolution in others, but instead embeds it in the objectification of herself in the form of her own literary works (many references from her works/notes, where it's mentioned, for example, in the introduction, which it roughly translates as: "The place where places and time exchange, I, you, and others exchange."). This erasure of differences also legitimizes the "postmodern" erasure of differences between dream and reality, the dreaming of a film within a film with narrative reality, the substitution of characters in the initial and establishing parable of a nightmare (which is important for the examination of the protagonist's relationship with her father, which, as I quickly discovered, plays a bigger role in the book than what I, at least, was able to observe in the film.). Above all, it legitimizes Schroeter's filmmaking artistry, which manages to grasp this duality/split of the protagonist in various doubling and mirroring techniques. /// This is not the place to examine the relationships between language and reality, which are important for understanding firstly the objectification of the protagonist, (not only?) resulting in her insane relationship with reality, and subsequently to understand the form of the book itself (also written by a woman before her death), and by extension, the form of this film. (04/11/2015)