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Paula Beer and Franz Rogowski, who made an impression in 2019’s “Transit,” are reunited by the director Christian Petzold for this adaptation of a European myth.
The great German writer-director Christian Petzold has a number of recurring fixations: women in trouble, doomed romance, the specters of a grim past hovering over an unsettled present. In film after mysterious, melancholy film, he s shuffled and reshuffled these noirish elements, placing them in revealing new configurations even when he sometimes relies on the same faces. In his brilliant 2019 drama, Transit, Franz Rogowski and Paula Beer played two almost-lovers caught in a kind of temporal loop: It was a wartime melodrama that kept running in circles, turning its characters into captives of history or genre or both.
Beer and Rogowski are back in Petzold s strange, steadily entrancing new picture, Undine, only this time there s nothing almost about their love story and nothing uncertain about their time frame. We are in present-day Berlin, though Undine Wibeau (Beer) dips frequently into the past in her work as a historian and guide, explaining how the city s recent developm