With Undine, German auteur Christian Petzold returns with yet another fablistic, allegorical musing on modern German life that touches its toes just beyond the boundary of the real world as we live in it. But this one, after the era-transposed adaptation Transit and the transfixing post-WWII quasi-romance Phoenix, is perhaps his most rooted in lore (both fantasy and historical), his most otherworldly, and his most swoon-inducing. Here he uses the elemental myth of the water nymph to reflect romance and a national identity haunted by periods of transition, where the birth of something new doesn’t so easily mean the death of what came before.
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