It's accurate to call DEADLY MARIA too good of a bad thing. A cheaper, grittier (perhaps black-and-white) look would have better suited this darkly intimate Teutonic psychodrama, graced with elaborate visuals and production values suitable for a movie of much larger scope.
Maria (Nina Petri) dwells in joyless marital servitude to much older Heinz (Peter Franke). Their family unit is completed by her father Jakobs (Joachim Krol), a demanding, incontinent invalid. Flashbacks gradually fill in Maria's miserable history: after her mother's death, Maria was raised by
Herr Jakobs in a virtual prison environment, with overtones of incest. When Jakobs one day glimpsed his teenaged daughter kissed by a boy, he suffered his crippling stroke. Subsequently, he arranged the union between Maria and Heinz, a drinking buddy with a similiar custodial attitude toward
women. Maria's most treasured memories are those of a brief school acquaintance with an exchange student; now she secretly hides her getaway money in an Oriental figurine, a parting gift from that long-lost friend.
Then another man enters Maria's small orbit. Dieter (Josef Bierbichler) rents the flat overlooked by Maria's window, and there, surrounded by stacks of old newspapers, he compiles dry reference books. Monkish as he is, Dieter is still the most pleasant and exciting man in Maria's life. But while
she's visiting him, Heinz locates and confiscates her cache of cash. This crushing defeat finally ignites rebellion, and Maria fatally impales Heinz with the rapier-thin figurine and lets her father perish from neglect. She then tries a suicidal plunge out the window but unintentionally lands
right on top of Dieter. In the final shot the wounded couple reach out to each other.
"Don't you pretend to be harmless!" scolds Jakobs at the mousy, retiring daughter who brings disaster to all the men she meets. It's as difficult to be unmoved by this domestic horror story as it is impossible to enjoy it, with point-blank performances by the cast and a potent arsenal of camera
tricks from 29-year-old first-time filmmaker Tom Tykwer, who uses jagged screen wipes to accompany the tearing open of a letter, a color-coded narrative chronology (cold tones for flashbacks, warm hues for the present), and enough morbid juxtapositions and angles to suggest an ancestral link with
Polanski's REPULSION. Lead actress Petri's agonized screen presence holds true (even during a misconceived metaphorical scene in which the childless heroine suddenly swells and messily gives birth to herself). DEADLY MARIA is seldom subtle and demonstrably overdone, but it makes its points about
patriarchal oppression with polish and visual finesse. (Violence, adult situations, sexual situations.) leave a comment
