Reality and sexual fantasy begin to blur in Florian Frerichs’ Traumnovelle.
Receiving its world premiere as the opening night film of the 2024 Oldenburg Film Festival, Frerichs’ film was presented with all of its stars taking to the stage and the director describing a five-year process to bring the story to the screen. Of course, Frerichs is not the first person to do so, with Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut the most famous adaptation but there also being Austrian, Australian and Italian versions of the story over the past sixty years. In Frerichs’ script, written with Martina van Delay, the action is transported from Vienna in 1900 to a modern Berlin. Adopting a suitably arch tone, Traumnovelle seeks to blend phantasmal sexual desire with dreamlike philosophising with varying degrees of success.
The narrative hews fairly closely to the source material, and opens with a doctor, Jakob (Nikolai Kinski) and his wife, Amelia (Laurin Price) putting their child to bed. Their home is moneyed, and they discuss a forthcoming trip to see Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the opera – a story in which a man named Jakob is driven to regicide by the perceived infidelity of his wife Amelia. Then they discuss the previous night at a club, where both of them were tempted by sexual encounters with other, masked people, and Amelia confesses a long-term fantasy about a Danish naval officer they encountered on a past holiday. This sends Jakob out into the night, stewing with resentment at his wife’s illusory betrayal and sending him into a string of strange, sexualised encounters – primarily his uninvited entry into a private orgy, wearing a cloak and mask to hide his identity.
In Schnitzler’s novel the absolute absurdity of the narrative, and the presentation of the bourgeois couple at its centre, are intended to be somewhat mocking. The extent of the male fantasy that Fridolin (the Jakob character) acts out is ludicrous enough to be lampooning and the bizarre nature of some of the scenarios he finds himself in are less far-fetched and more farcical. Frerichs’ version is perhaps more successful at conveying this sense to its audience than Kubrick’s was. Eyes Wide Shut has all the same elements and treats them in a similarly mannered way, but which were perhaps more difficult for audiences to parse in the moment. Frerichs is well aware of the silliness and his cast are capable of balancing playing their characters completely straight, while lacing every line of dialogue and every bit of blocking with charged suggestion.
Frerichs makes overt the unreality of some of the situations, depicting a moment in which Jakob expertly fights off a group of thugs in an alley, before pulling the action back to reveal this to be in the doctor’s mind. We’re left to wonder what else we’re seeing in playing out in the same psychological stage rather than in the real world. The entire premise of the film is based on Jakob taking Amelia’s fantasies as genuine unfaithfulness. “It’s only desire, it’s not real,” she tries to explain to him, but he evidently cannot distinguish. And so, the portent of the dialogue, the laden sensual atmosphere of the scenes is called into question. Even Jakob’s secretary, when coming into his office to check on his schedule, stands too close, and gives him too lingering of a look.
Of course, this ripeness will not be to everyone’s tastes – in the same way the stilted nature of Eyes Wide Shut divided audiences. Even if you are able to tune into Traumnovelle’s wavelength, the tone can still sometimes feel at odds with the narrative and the themes. A subplot with the costume shop owner from whom he rents his mask, which surrounds his son’s depravity and mental health, doesn’t quite land, and there are other moments of a similarly hokey nature. Fortunately, the overall trancelike ambiance can help these things to fall by the wayside if necessary.
In the original novel, the password the protagonist had to give to enter the orgy was ‘Denmark,’ evidently a reference to his wife’s fantasy sailor. In Kubrick’s film the word is ‘Fidelio,’ referencing the Beethoven opera about a faithful wife seeking to save her imprisoned husband. In Frerichs and van Delay’s version, the word is ‘Verdi’ in reference to Un Ballo in Maschera, perhaps hinting at their core interest in telling this story. Verdi’s opera is about a man consumed by the perceived adultery of his wife, and it is clear to see the parallels. Whether the viewer can get on board with the pitch of Traumnovelle will ultimately define how much they can invest such meaning into its theatricality, but there is much here to enjoy regardless.
Director, editing: Florian Frerichs
Screenplay: Florian Frerichs, Martina van Delay
Cast: Nikolai Kinski, Laurine Prince, Nora Islei, Nike Martens, Bruno Eyron
Producers: Christoph Fisser, Florian Frerichs
Cinematography: Konstantin Freyer
Music: Tuomas Kentelinen
Sound: Darius Shahidifar
Production design: Tanja Bombach, Itamar Zechoval
Costume design: Itamar Zechoval
Production companies: Studio Babelsberg, Warnuts Entertainment, Gretchenfilm, Thomas Kretschmer THK Filmproduktion (all Germany)
Venue: Oldenburg Film Festival
In English, German
108 minutes
