A film about insanity, passion and art. In a fictional and theatrical Vienna, a writer shares her home with a man who has the very feminine name Malina. The woman meets Ivan and falls in love. It will be her last grand love. The woman becomes so fixated by the man that he is unable to understand or answer her passion. According to Werner Schroeter Malina is only about love and the film reveals the loneliness of the one who loves.Malina has fierce proponents and opponents, but the critics agree on one thing: the role of Isabelle Huppert as the writer is sublime. The film has a striking opera-like score by Giacomo Manzoni which operates more or less independently of the pictures, but which fits in with the mood very well. There have been discussions about the idiosyncratic way that Werner Schroeter has interpreted Ingeborg Bachmann’s book. For instance he is alleged not to have remained faithful to the book. Schroeter: ‘I do not feel obliged to follow Bachmann closely when she chooses to speak in literary terms about a very everyday problem’.Yet he has been meticulous with the language and the writer’s wordplay. Elfriede Jelinek translated the written language into dialogue and Schroeter’s hand is especially obvious in the stylisation of the dramatic images and the mise-en-scène. The language, the words, form part of the work as the libretto of an opera is part and parcel of the performance. The film’s strength is in the aesthetics and the radicalism of the performance.
