Directed by Christian Alsan, ‘Marter’ is a short film that burns slowly, decisively leaving the residue of an unease that is historical yet unnervingly contemporary. The film is set in 1622, whereby Badria is a young woman who is accused of killing a princess after giving birth and was later accused of being a witch. However, the real topic of the movie is not superstition per se, but the machinery of power that require guilt even before the truth is even considered.
The focus of the film is the acting of Julia Obst as Badria, the emotional and moral center of the work. Badria is played with such restraint by Obst: her performance is not so based on demonstrative fear or hysteria but on the ability to remain still, to look sparingly and to have an inner opposition. In a narrative in which silence is turned against her, Obst turns said silence into a sound that is echoed and rebellious. Her character of Badria is not a cry of pity, but a silent horror of a person who knows that innocence is not a good defense at least in a system which is created to incriminate. The performance is gritty and bare and fits right into what Alsan claimed he wanted to have, a performance that is both “immediate and ancient all at once”.
The general coherence of ‘Marter’ is the specific factor that makes it quite efficient. The thematic desire of the film, faith, violence, belief and the price of integrity do not control the story. All the details, including the bleak environment and the ruthless timekeeping, are used to answer the main question, which the movie asks: to what extent can people go in pursuit of their ideals? Instead of providing easy answers, the film permits its tension to build up through implication and repetition in the style of the cold logic of persecution itself. It is the integrity of not turning soft or overexplaining; the movie has the confidence in their viewers to make the parallels between historical events and current-day ones.
At the end, ‘Marter’ is more of a warning than of a period piece. The film reveals a cycle that has never been broken by revealing how the truth can be distorted by authority and how enforced silence of a woman can be more eloquent than anything she can say. The exasperation of Alsan with the mechanisms, silence, and artistic submission finds a compressed expression in the form of a short film which, however, is uncompromising to both shape and intent. With Julia Obst in a role that is almost devastatingly quiet, ‘Marter’ is a focused, coherent piece of work that sticks with one long after it has finished, demanding an answer to its question not as a provocation, but as an accusation.
Written by Vlad A.G