Deadly Maria

A Liebesfilm production.

1993, 35mm. 106 minutes. Language: German

Film Essay
by Peter Cowie.

“Dying is an art, like everything else.”
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

Tykwer makes his feature film debut with a hermetic study in suffering and humiliation. His latent talent emerges in every sequence, and his eagerness to take risks is already apparent. His heroine, Maria, shares many of the same traits as Tykwer’s women in Wintersleepers, The Princess and the Warrior and Heaven. She’s repressed and numbed by her experiences in childhood and marriage. Her mother died while giving birth to her, and her father, a brooding, contemptuous creature, keeps her away from the outside world. Maria must serve first him and then her husband, an equally truculent, possessive individual.

In this loveless world, Maria finds refuge in her secret hoard of letters. Ever since adolescence, she has been writing but never posting them. Through them, we learn of her childhood and youth. Her other ray of hope is the bachelor who lives in the same apartment block. Almost as reticent and insecure as Maria, he has filled his flat with piles of old newspapers, from which he compiles reference books.

Fundamentally, the film is a conflict between survival and extinction. Maria has been in the presence of death for as long as she can remember – and her father and husband are both “living dead,” seeing out each day in a series of mechanical, emotionless rituals (sex included). She herself collects insects, something that foretells the grisly dénouement. Her descent into madness reminds us of Polanski’s Repulsion, and the macabre, claustrophobic apartment owes something to The Silence of the Lambs – although the production design prefigures much of Tykwer’s own future work. The use of sombre reds in both decoration and costumes underscores the expressionist tone of Deadly Maria. So too does the murky camerawork by Frank Griebe, who has become an essential member of Tykwer’s team during the past decade. His lighting skills are exemplified in the baleful, recurring shot gazing up the staircase to the room where Maria’s father lies paralysed.

The surrealist dream sequences give an edge to the suspense and the horror, and also counterpoint Tykwer’s theme of inarticulacy. Every character in the film seems clenched, unable to communicate with others. This leads inevitably to frustration, anger, and desperation, notably where love is concerned. The father has suffered a stroke when he finds Maria kissing a student from her high school, and spends the rest of his days paralysed, and exacting a grim revenge. He “collects” her first suitor, Heinz, as Maria herself collects flies, and makes him a prisoner of the household. The irony is that Heinz in turn becomes as domineering as the father. Only when both men are dead can Maria herself seek liberation by committing suicide. The ambivalence of the ending reveals in Tykwer a poetic reluctance to let his leading characters come to naught.

The amazing thing about Deadly Maria is that, despite its gruesome story, it remains such an exhilarating film to watch. Tykwer experiments in every department. His soundtrack is a medley of original, electronic music, and extracts from classical pieces to suit a specific mood (although it’s a pity that Saint-Saëns’s “Aquarium”, so romantic in context here, should now be associated with the opening of every presentation at the Cannes Festival). Tykwer casts three actresses in the part of Maria, representing her in childhood, adolescence, and womanhood, rather as Alan Parker would do in Angela’s Ashes. The dialogue, which the director wrote with Christiane Voss, has that stop-start quality reminiscent of Harold Pinter or David Mamet, and is built on a crumbling base of misunderstanding at every level.

Tykwer loves to dolly in and out of his character’s faces, or to glide around them in ever-nearing circles. In the few external sequences, Maria is seen drifting through the streets in slow-motion, as though everyday life were a dream-state, and her “twilight zone” apartment the actual world. When Maria suddenly starts chattering to her neighbour, Tykwer emphasises the moment with a series of rapid dissolves, both visual and verbal. Like Franka Potente’s Lola, Maria has a sixth sense that alarms her at moments of crisis. Like Lola, too, she knows the importance of time, and the inexorable movement of the minute-hand on the kitchen clock becomes a trademark not just here but throughout Tykwer’s career.

Nina Petri’s performance as Maria in present time represents a remarkable achievement, pared down to essentials and proudly rejecting any sympathy. Josef Bierbichler gives the father a controlled rage, an animalistic quality that bursts to the surface during the scene when he’s being bathed by Maria. Péter Franke as Heinz, Maria’s husband, is equally restrained, seeming to age literally with each passing sequence – almost dead before his death. Joachim Król as the archivist who beguiles Maria has a shyness that makes him in many ways the hero of the film.

Although its mood sometimes recalls Lynch’s Blue Velvet or Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, Deadly Maria is the most “Mitteleuropäische” of all Tykwer’s features. It might have been made in Prague or Warsaw, Vienna or Budapest. Its fatalism, as well as its Freudian overtones, evokes the world of Schnitzler, Dostoievsky, Hesse and Bulgakov. But filtered through the exciting sensibility of a director who at one, uncompromising stroke carves a niche for himself in modern European cinema.

Maria’s life fluctuates between reality, myth and fairytale. Neither holy nor virginal, Maria is a woman in her late thirties, whose story could take place in any given period. Together with her husband Heinz and her bedridden father Maria inhabits a cave-like, airless set of rooms.

Her mysterious cosmos is hermetically sealed. Only insects manage to penetrate this dark world; the ones that succeed in getting in fall victim to her bizarre passion for collecting and keeping things in order, but also her suppressed aggression.

Maria’s world is the household and the housework, a well-organized ritual consisting of fastidious gestures and a precisely-timed parade of daily chores. Sometimes she sets herself absurd tasks, like trying to move the dead flies and other objects telekinetically.

She has no real contact with the world outside. Out on the street she counts her steps, lost in her own thoughts; she is more preoccupied with listening to her own heartbeat than heeding the people around her. Maria moves as if in a vacuum. Only from a safe distance does she dare secretly observe the comings and goings of a sympathetic neighbour. Time passes, as if it were a bitter, viscous mass.

One morning the telephone rings. The voice of a man can be heard. It’s Dieter, the neighbour from one of the rear apartments. Under a pretext they meet in his apartment, a veritable labyrinth of piles of newspapers and paper. Dieter turns out to be Maria’s soulmate – he too is slightly odd, afraid of people, with a mania for collecting things. And he too is brimming over with longing. Both immediately recognize their kindred spirits and fall helplessly head over heels in love.

From now on nothing is as it was before. When Dieter asks Maria about her past she falters. She doesn’t know what to say to him. She bolts out of Dieter’s apartment in great consternation. Her emotions are in turmoil, her thoughts churning. It’s as if something is bubbling up inside her, something inside is being put in motion – in a terrifying new way.

As Maria runs out of the building in dismay, Heinz enters their apartment to search for her secretly accrued savings. He has gambling debts. With brute force Heinz breaks open the wooden figure in which Maria has hidden her money. The actions inflicted on the mistreated figure are in some way magically transferred to Maria’s body. As Heinz drops the figure into the aquarium she finds herself fighting desperately for breath. She falls unconscious on the street and is nearly run over by a bus. Water runs from her mouth…

The little wooden figure, which she has named ‘Fomimo’, is very special for Maria. Since her childhood she has written letters to Fomimo every day and hidden them in a lounge-room cupboard which has a false back to it. When Maria comes to, she decides to rescue the letters from oblivion – and with them her life’s story. When she opens the cupboard, a veritable flood of paper streams out.

She begins to read, letter after letter. Images from her childhood appear before her. Scenes from her own birth flash before her eyes, a birth that led to the death of her mother. One after another other nightmarish images, grotesque figures and overwhelming visions rush through her mind. Then the memory of a momentous event that happened when she was sixteen forces its way to the surface. A school friend, a boy, rings the bell and inveigles his way into the apartment where Maria is alone all day. Her inhibitions and her shyness excite him and he flirts with her, entices her to him. Just as she hesitantly overcomes her inhibitions and allows him to kiss her, her father unexpectedly arrives home. The brief romance degenerates into a traumatic experience. Her father is at first paralyzed by shock and jealousy, then grabs his ‘rival’ by the hair and throws him out of the apartment – and promptly collapses.

He never recovers and from this point on remains bed-ridden.

Maria’s horrified feelings of shame and guilt have molded her entire life. It’s how her father has been able to force her into marriage with his card-game buddy Heinz.

But she has a chance to change her life.

Her memories and her unexpected love for Dieter seem to bring so many suppressed emotions to the surface, the missed opportunities, her secret desires and especially the lust for life that she thought she no longer had, which she has avoided for so long by investing her time in senseless, quirky activities. Maria now dreams of just one thing – to get away from this self-destructive half-life and the chains of the past, which are to some extent self-inflicted.

Events change course in an almost fateful way. Maria’s previous tendency to just go through the motions of life now transforms into highly calculated actions. Harmless objects like the tea-kettle or Fomimo the wooden figure change into ‘accomplices’ in the hands of a ’re-awakened’ Maria, and become tools of her sudden and lethal liberation. Maria’s final and comprehensive blow, aimed above all at her husband and her father, rebounds on her.

As Maria loses everything and throws herself into the abyss, only a miracle can save her.

And it seems Maria has a guardian angel.

Cast

Crew

Interview With Tom Tykwer
“I am unable to improvise.”

How did the screenplay come about? In which mould do you see yourself as a writer?

I’d previously made two short films [BECAUSE and EPILOG], which, like DEADLY MARIA, concerned the impossibility, the contrariness of love, but they were far more autobiographical. The parallels with my private life constricted me to a certain extent. I identified so closely with and felt so duty-bound toward the characters that I didn’t push the envelope to the limits, formally or in terms of character portrayal.

However, I was also interested in developing my own cinematic language. Which is why this time I developed the characters not so intimately connected with me, and for which there were no previous specific constructs. That gave me more freedom in terms of the methods I was able to use. Nevertheless, it’s still a very personal film – that’s a basic thing with me. Just not so private.

What interested you in the story of a woman or a character like Maria?

I developed the basic framework of the story together with a woman (Christiane Voss), that’s where half the influence lies. Apart from that, I like female leads. I believe them capable of doing much more. We rapidly agreed on the idea of the Maria-father-Heinz triangle, and that a new love should be the trigger for a chain reaction.

DEADLY MARIA seems to stand halfway between a realistic study of an underworld, a particular milieu, and a surreal kind of fairy story. Was that your approach?

The milieu isn’t precisely defined, nor the exact period in which the film takes place. This in-between world has something general about it, since I haven’t placed the film in a specific period of German history. However, a feeling of old-worldliness seems to permeate it and that has to do with my search for a particular atmosphere in a film, for a particular ‘aura’.

In which tradition do you see yourself belonging?

Actually there are two contradictory elements – the films that have inspired me are like that too – and that expresses itself in this film. On the one hand I admire radical realists such as Rivette and Cassavetes, and on the other hand Scorsese’s films and the early films by Lynch and Fellini, which excited me because they were so visionary. I wanted to bring both these elements together into a kind of abstract realism, if I can put it like that. DEADLY MARIA is a bastard born of this contradictory approach and that, I think, lends it a certain inner tension.

What is your method of working?

I’m unable to improvise. What I like best is to have everything sorted out before shooting starts, from the production design to the size of the frame. I try to decide on most things like that in discussions with my colleagues at the storyboard stage, so I have more time for the actors during shooting. Unfortunately there’s little time to rehearse beforehand.

You might say I develop a film in five stages. First of all comes the screenplay, which is the most demanding phase for me, I find writing pure torture. Then comes the storyboard, which takes a similar amount of time because I have to ‘rewrite’ the whole film, only this time in scrawly pictures. That takes place parallel to the preparations for the actual shooting.

Shooting itself is stage three, and in this case it took just on eight weeks. Then comes the editing, and the last stage is laying down the sound and the music. With each stage you remake the film anew and take it in a new direction.

You’ve worked with some of the same people since your first short film. Is there a reason for that?

Absolutely. After all there are some things that can’t be communicated unless you’re on the same aesthetic wavelength and have the same preferences. If, for example, I were to work with a different cameraman, it would be more difficult to make our concepts compatible with one another. With Frank it’s easy, as I’ve discussed these things with him from the very beginning.

What sort of criteria did you use to choose your actors?

The only person I really had in mind from the very beginning, was Bierbichler for the role of the father. He has so much physically presence, so manly and with a slight animalistic quality. That he of all people should be bedridden, makes him all the more threatening, so much is pent up in him. On seeing Uwe Sehrader’s MAU MAU once more, I found Peter Franke great all over again, so reserved and indecisive yet with such a macho kind of presence.

For me, Nina Petri is a true discovery. A woman that makes you look twice. Charismatic, and yet not your typical model type. She took lots of risks during filming and I think she’s really ideal for this difficult role.

I cast Król right at the last moment, because the film by Buck wasn’t yet finished and it was only a couple of days before we began shooting that I saw a rough-cut video. He is exactly the right contrasting character vis-a-vis the other two men – eccentric, endearing and not at all brutish.

What was the most difficult thing during shooting?

The hardest thing for me is directing the actors. That's where the most vagaries lie. It's something that's difficult to put your finger on – and not conducive to forward planning. That’s why it demands the most concentration. When it works it’s all the more exciting. The stunt of course also had us all biting our nails. A woman throws herself onto some piled up cardboard boxes from a height of thirteen meters. I can’t imagine getting used to something like that.

How did you become a film fan, and in fact get involved in film?

I’m a film nerd. At some point when I was eight I saw KING KONG and since then I’ve been utterly addicted to cinema. The character of Dieter in DEADLY MARIA really has a lot to do with me. For years I was occupied only with film. It was a kind of mania, I collected material and memorized names like a madman, and was always running off to the cinema.

When I was thirteen I got my first job in a cinema, first as a ticket-taker, then as a projectionist. Now I’m earning money programming films and analyzing screenplays for film production and distribution companies. A somewhat one-dimensional existence you might say, but for some amazing reason ‘normal’ people took me on and bestowed on me a socially acceptable existence. So maybe I wasn't quite as behaviourally disturbed as my career seemed to indicate.

What are your sources of inspiration?

The dynamic in my romantic relationship is central. That’s extremely taxing because we come from completely different backgrounds and seldom agree on anything. So there’s a constant source of friction, which stimulates the imagination. What else? The cinema, as always. And music.

In your films there’s a lot of repetition. What is it about this process that interests you so much?

I like it when a film is just as entangled story-wise as able to mirror its own constructs and materials back on itself. Playing around with the timeframe or pushing it into the realm of the absurd, above all in short films, is a process of refraction that produces a tension between form and story. In DEADLY MARIA it’s more the mechanics of the way the sequence of events unfold that interested me.

What do you like best about DEADLY MARIA?

The inherent contradictions. That the film is so vehemently formal and yet still relates such a quiet story. I wanted to bring out the subjective aspects, in other words to emphasize the extreme perceptions this woman has. What takes place may look banal and unspectacular from the outside, but for Maria it is a radical experience.

What subject are you working on at the moment?

Love, as always. And how difficult it is.

Press cuttings

Westdeutsche Zeitung
3.1.1994

Berliner Morgenpost
13.1.1994

Berliner Zeitung
13.1.1994

BZ
13.1.1994

Kino Heinz Magazin, Wuppertal
1994