Movies about writers are almost impossible to do well—the revolutions per minute of a writer’s mind are nearly beyond the grasp of a camera, whereas the outward activities of writing are nearly inert. (Similarly, writing about filmmaking is largely doomed, because nothing in the intricacy of a literary passage can rival the gestalt of a single image.) Yet Werner Schroeter’s 1991 drama “Malina” (long unavailable, and now streaming on MUBI) is one of the few movies that rise to the achievement of the authors at its center—both the real-life one, Ingeborg Bachmann, whose novel it’s an adaptation of, and the fictitious, unnamed writer (played by Isabelle Huppert), the main character of the novel, whose life and work both the book and the movie depict. The movie’s literary artistry is due, in part, to a second literary refraction that the novel underwent en route to the screen: Bachmann’s novel was published in 1971 (she died in 1973), and the script for Schroeter’s film was written by Elfriede Jelinek, who would go on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“Malina” catches the profuse, prolific, prodigious, and prodigal imagination of its protagonist—the enormous energy of creation and clamor of thought that are inseparable from the writer’s moment-to-moment whirl of daily activity. It does so with a surprising and canny economy of means that’s all the more remarkable given the torrential genius that Bachmann displays in the novel, which is a masterwork of rare imaginative power. (The novel was republished by New Directions in 2019, in Philip Boehm’s revision of his own 1990 translation, with an introduction by Rachel Kushner.) Like the movie, the novel is the story of an unnamed female writer; unlike the movie, it’s narrated in the first person, and, as such, it’s one of the great portraits of a mind at work—of a woman’s mind, in urgent thought about the very implications of writing and living as a woman. It’s a novel in three parts, each devoted largely to a different man—to her literary lover, Malina, who works at a military museum; to Ivan, a younger, nonliterary man whom she seizes for sex and romantic banality; and to her father, an abusive and violent (and possibly incestuous) monster, memories and nightmares of whom haunt her.
The novel is wildly fragmented, yet it remains tautly bound by its thematic and tonal coherence and by its protagonist’s overwhelming mental energy, a relentlessly forward-driving rush of creativity that assimilates disparate elements and incidents. The novel features the protagonist’s intricate and torrential narration of her daily life and her distant past, her letters (which are a major part of her literary output), a long fable, a batch of tightly detailed dreams, an extended interview with a journalist, large and short chunks of her dialogues with Ivan and Malina, and shards of a music score by Schoenberg. Her voice veers between exalted observation, scathing poetic insight, and day-to-day ordinariness of restaurants and food, clothing and street life, all infused with the context of Austrian history and culture.
Amazingly, the movie “Malina,” though running a mere two hours, retains the sense of an overpacked and centrifugal inner life—and its fluid precision is itself a sort of onscreen inscription of images. Like the book, the movie is a gathering of moments, progressing from a more contained chaos to an entropic catastrophe. The movie’s poles are found at the start, in a pre-credit sequence showing the writer experiencing her father’s brutality in what may be a nightmare or an irrepressible memory, and then, right after the credits, another sequence of the writer at her desk, typing poetry (heard in Huppert’s voice-over) and then preparing literary letters for the mail. The camera glides probingly around her until, in a brusque dash, Malina arrives to supervise her output.
Huppert’s performance—one of her best—is similarly both contained and hectic. Though Huppert is often seated or recumbent or totally slouched, even then she seems to be in reckless motion—and, when she’s in motion, the sense of frenzy is nonetheless infused with a sense of intellectual possession. Her wild gestures and heedless behavior are tightly strung with her thoughtful concentration, and her poised contemplations and languid passions vibrate with the tension of her barely restrained emotions and the propulsion of her creative drive. In the novel, Ivan is Hungarian, and the book is strewn with phrases in that language; in the movie, he’s played by the Hungarian actor Can Togay, whose brusque and simple candor (and choppy, accented French) contrasts with the lofty ironic detachment of Malina (played by the German actor Mathieu Carrière). Like Bachmann’s novel, the movie fuses the writer’s nightmares, memories, and fantasies, theatrical performances and movies watched, with her ordinary life, which is bent toward the hallucinatory disturbances of her imaginative overdrive and over-cathected perceptions.
The writer gives interviews that glitter with her philosophical paradoxes. She teaches philosophy and gives a classroom lecture that has the blood-sport enthusiasm of a bullfight. She sits at her typewriter, scribbling away in longhand on a sheet of paper piled up amid the chaos of her desk and then throwing it with casual fury into another scattering of pages on the floor. She panics at a pay phone, despairs over telegrams, abuses pills; she endures a summer vacation in a rustic castle, deals with Ivan’s young sons, sees to her wardrobe, supervises a secretary (amazingly, named Fräulein Jellinek, as in the novel). In each of these scenes, Schroeter—inspired by opera (as in his 1980 working-class epic, “Palermo or Wolfsburg,” about a Sicilian laborer who travels to Germany to work in the Volkswagen factory)—creates baroque, swirling, floating, oblique, yet thoughtfully poised images. They’re streaked with deep shadows, contrasting bright light, and lurid color (thanks to Elfi Mikesch’s cinematography) that coalesce with the varied array of opera arias heard on the soundtrack.
Jelinek’s script has a fierce literary authority that bears the mark of her own scarified confrontation with the novel. She rearranges it drastically; she distills the tangled turbulence of the writer’s mind with an extraordinary discernment, capturing—and condensing—its elements to convey both stark juxtaposition and teeming accumulation. Schroeter responds to Jelinek’s fiercely heightened compressions of the novel with an explosively varied array of images, ranging in tone from blunt to hectic to slashing to sharp-pointed. (The condensation also turns several long, literally narrated sequences obliquely symbolic.) And, where Jelinek retains the terrifying drift of Bachmann’s ending, she also leaves vast space for Schroeter’s singular cinematic sensibility to transform it far beyond the novel’s purview. The last half hour of the film is a wild scene of creation and destruction, of the inner life rendered hyperbolically physical, of fantasies of blood that become real and dreams of devastation that come off as terrifyingly, absurdly normal. It culminates in an amazing, extended conflagration—one of the most surprising and astounding scenes of fire that I’ve ever witnessed in a movie—and a game of multiplying and disappearing identities in mirrors that recalls the climactic funhouse scene in Orson Welles’s “The Lady from Shanghai.” It suggests the very self-consuming passion of a soul in flames.
