Valerie
| Year: | 2007 |
| Production Co: | Credofilm |
| Director: | Birgit Moller |
The debut effort by director Birgit Moller, Valerie is about a young, waifish model used to a glamourous but vacuous existence of drugs, champagne, ritzy hotels and wealth.
We meet Valerie on the cusp of a freezing Berlin Christmas when the work and - worse - the money has run out. She doesn't have enough to pay her hotel bill, or get her car out of the parking garage.
Soon reduced to skipping taxi fares, eating strangers' food in restaurants and trying to swindle one last job out of her increasingly disinterested colleagues, Valerie isn't an uplifting tale a la The Pursuit of Happyness complete with Accredited Hollywood Suffering. It's a detached study of a life spiralling quietly out of control in one woman's mind as she finds herself in circumstances for which the world has no care or answer.
There's little introduction or resolution; in that uniquely Germanic way we're just told with ruthless efficiency what's going on and left to make of it what we will – even whether Valerie will survive.
We meet Valerie on the cusp of a freezing Berlin Christmas when the work and - worse - the money has run out. She doesn't have enough to pay her hotel bill, or get her car out of the parking garage.
Soon reduced to skipping taxi fares, eating strangers' food in restaurants and trying to swindle one last job out of her increasingly disinterested colleagues, Valerie isn't an uplifting tale a la The Pursuit of Happyness complete with Accredited Hollywood Suffering. It's a detached study of a life spiralling quietly out of control in one woman's mind as she finds herself in circumstances for which the world has no care or answer.
There's little introduction or resolution; in that uniquely Germanic way we're just told with ruthless efficiency what's going on and left to make of it what we will – even whether Valerie will survive.