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DILLON ON FILM
Victoria: 10 Years On
Sebastian Schipper’s one-take emotional rollercoaster remains just as potent a decade later
Reviewing Victoria as a tenth-anniversary feature feels like a slight cheat since I didn’t see it at the cinema until April 2016. Nonetheless, this was first shown in early 2015, and that gives me the perfect excuse to wax lyrical about one of the most extraordinary films of the last decade. Astonishingly, Victoria went under the radar with many audiences, so it is my delight to shine a spotlight on director Sebastian Schipper’s one-take masterpiece once more.
Before I get to Schipper, it’s important to note that cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen is the first name to appear on the credits rather than the director. Why? Because of the aforementioned one-take. Victoria was filmed digitally in a continuous 138-minute stretch. Regular readers will know I lament the loss of 35mm as the standard upon which motion pictures are shot, but this film provides one of the most compelling rebuttals to my nostalgia-tinted spectacles. It could not have been shot on 35mm, as Schipper would have needed to reload film reels every ten minutes. Alfred Hitchcock’s pseudo-one-take Rope (1948) features inexplicable camera pans to the backs of people’s jackets for this very reason; to allow seemingly…
