It takes chutzpah, for a film maker to adapt the same source material as Stanley Kubrick. Yet, that’s exactly what director Florian Frerichs ( The Last Supper) has done with TRAUMNOVELLE (DREAM STORY) his film based on Arthur Schnitzler’s classic 1926 novella, that inspired Kubrick’s Eyes Shut Wide. Frerichs offers a cinematic take on the story that’s more faithful than Kubrick’s, plus it’s more erotic.
The story is set in modern-day Berlin with the first scene opening to two beautiful women coming onto a man in a nightclub by demonstrating the salutary effects of a vibrator app. The man is Jacob (Nikolai Kinsky, Klaus’s son, who doesn’t emanate the same aura of menace as his father), a doctor who is at the club with his wife Amelia( Laurine Price). Even though both he and Amelia attract the attentions of the opposite sex while they are out, they dutifully go home together. But the experience does lead them to talk about sexual desires and fantasies with Amelia confessing to have become infatuated from a far with a handsome Danish naval officer while they were recently on vacation.
This prompts an outraged and hurt Jacob to head out into the night, where he experiences a series of bizarre, sexually tinged encounters- the most notable of which are visits to a bordello after meeting a beautiful young woman (Nora Islei) on the street and a private sex party in which all the participants are required to wear masks. Along the way there are numerous fantasy sequences, including Jacob performing on stage in an opera and having blood caughed on him by fellow singers. If it all comes across, as Schnitzler intended- like an extended dream sequence with many elements sexualised, including the nurse in Jacob’s practice.
The director takes big stylistic swings such as Jacob talking directly to the audience and employing colourful animation, some of it rotoscoped , during a dream sequence. It feels strange that the dialogue is in English, with only occasional snippets of German thrown in, like an old World War 2 movie.
TRAUMNOVELLE is certainly absorbing, thanks to the lurid nature of its source material, but it too often feels redolent of the sort of soft-core erotica that used to pop on late nite cable. Kinsky, who is on screen for virtually every minute, is a compelling offbeat screen presence, more convincing in his journey down the sexual rabbit hole than Tom Cruise ever managed to be. His performance is one of the stronger elements in a film that never quite lives up to its considerable ambitions.
