AKA Dream Story

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream. . .

– Edgar Allan Poe

DIRECTED BY: Florian Frerichs

FEATURING: Nikolai Kinski, Laurine Price, Bruno Eyron

PLOT: Disturbed by his wife’s fantasies of infidelity, a physician crashes a secret orgy.

COMMENTS: “Wanna go. . . someplace else?”

Although not a Surrealist, Arthur Schnitzler’s Traumnovelle tells the tale of a married man who, for twenty-hours, basically lives his life according to what André Breton, the founder of Surrealism, called “objective chance.”¹ After arguing with his wife and losing a patient, Jakob (Kinski) wanders aimlessly around Berlin, ping-ponging from one chance encounter to another, searching for that elusive else, while preoccupied with thoughts of death and sex.

So, if Schnitzler’s story can be interpreted as a Surrealist tale, then what do we expect to see when it becomes a film? Is a Surrealist story necessarily a weird movie? Does it have to contain the cinematic equivalent of melting clocks, or can it treat dream reality in more varied and subtle ways?

Traumnovelle contains only one melting reality scene: when the wife, Amelia, describes her dream to her husband and an animated sequence takes over the narrative. The morphing visuals depict the couple in a variety of landscapes according to constantly shifting art styles. The rest of the film depicts a Berlin filtered through Jakob’s daydreams and imagination. Nothing in the live-action sequences is impossible in reality, but a build-up of eerie coincidences and uncanny repetitions create the slightly sinister atmosphere of a nightmare.

Viewers familiar with Stanley Kubrick‘s Eyes Wide Shut (1999), also based on Schnitzler’s story, will recognize the major plot points. During an evening at a nightclub, where Amelia dances with a masked man, a pair of women in domino masks tries to pick up Jakob. The question of escape, paired with the teasing offer to play with their VibrateApp, solicits only an echo from the stupefied Jakob: “Someplace else?”

Ultimately, he leaves the girls to their remote vibrator, rescues his wife from the masked man and takes her home. The couple have a heated discussion over whether or not they are both sexually attracted to other people. Amelia then thoroughly shocks Jakob by revealing she would have left him for a random officer, glimpsed in their hotel during their previous summer’s vacation.

To avoid her while he thinks this through, Jakob spends the night on the town. He’s awkwardly hit on by the daughter of his dead patient, follows a prostitute back to her room only to leave without enjoying her services, and eventually runs into a former classmate and medical school dropout, Nick Nightingale, now a shady nightclub performer.

During his strolls through the city, Jakob’s thoughts continually intrude into everyday life in genuinely startling moments. While listening to Verdi’s “A Masked Ball” he pictures himself as one of the opera singers, but the other players continually interrupt the performance while dying of consumption. Many of the random people he encounters reappear in different guises. In some cases, this element of weirdness is explained away. The club’s night bartender works as a barista at a coffee shop by day; nothing unusual there. But when Jakob goes to the hospital, having read of the prostitute’s overdose, there’s no explanation for why the receptionist looks just like her. All the world’s a stage, and we’re all merely players?

At times, Jakob seems aware of this odd situation. Kinski seamlessly shifts gears throughout his compelling performance. He quotes from Edgar Allan Poe‘s poem with the same naturalness as the rest of the dialogue. In an extended sequence, he walks through a maze of alleyways, breaking the fourth wall while recounting the phenomenon of people who disappear from their lives, only to return years later without any memory of what happened, as though they awoke from a dream.

Though richly layered in techniques and references, Traumnovelle never comes across as pretentious. A thoroughly twenty-first century adaptation, it retains a sly sense of humor about the present era. Nightingale is the kind of guy who’s fun to hang out with until you either end up in jail with him or he’s begging you for bail money on PayApp (bitcoin’s okay, but no etherium). Upon learning of Nightingale’s late night gigs playing piano while masked at private parties, Jakob finagles the password out of him without much effort.

The costume designs feature a lot of black leather, fetish gear, whips and chains. The notorious orgy scene takes place in a dilapidated abandoned mansion, where Jakob arrives via CarApp. He witnesses various BDSM scenarios in separate rooms. In the central parlor, figures dressed as masked nuns encircle a group of “prisoners” in striped uniforms with burlap sacks covering their heads.

“Who the fuck are these people?” Jakob wonders. When the camera pans out to reveal the prisoners kneeling upon a schwarze sonne inlaid in the floor, it seems he has his answer. Most of the other participants, clothed in plain black cloaks and featureless black masks, blend into an indistinct mass. Only the “sacrifice” stands out, the woman who begs Jakob to leave before it’s too late, and who then offers herself in his stead.

Jakob retraces his steps the following day, without the benefit of anyone to explain the events of the previous night. He’s curious to discover whatever he can about the mysterious woman who saved him, but vaguely menacing figures thwart his investigation. Why all the secrecy? Early in their conversations, Jakob tells Amelia, “if it’s nothing more than desire, it’s not real.” And yet he’s seen for himself how desire and power manifest in a world where the push of a button grants anything you wish.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“[Jokob’s] wanderings turn into a weird psychological trip punctuated by increasingly bizarre encounters. Jakob’s voyage becomes a hallucinogenic exploration of interior landscapes, where dream and reality dance in unending, indistinguishable choreography. His fantasy scenes, ranging from operatic performances to violent encounters, are psychic projections that feel more emotionally authentic than everyday life. These strange interludes reveal the complex, chaotic inner world beneath professional composure. – Naser Nahandian, Gazettely (contemporaneous)

Where to watch Traumnovelle