Das Zimmer der Zauberinnen (2000) Online

Claude Miller, working this time in digital film, has made another superb study of a young woman under great pressure (mainly self-applied) who manages to work through her trauma. After the Charlotte Gainsbourg films of the 80's, and the wonderful L'Accompagnatrice with Romane Bohringer, he's looking at burnout in a thirty-year-old anthropology student who has a break down just days before the oral defence of her thesis. Claire is stubborn, sarcastic with everyone, and doubting her academic vocation.

In a hospital room with two other women, one of them a very disturbed elderly woman given to nocturnal wanderings that tie the staff in knots, she comes to understand something of herself, why she fights with her parents, why she's in a no-win relationship with a married man, why her studies of African myth and symbol are going nowhere. The digital camera in the cramped room is used very effectively to maintain a claustrophobic mood.

This film, the first of ARTE (French/German channel)"petite caméra" series, was shot with 2 miniDV DX100 Panasonic cameras. The kind of stuff you can buy at your local store. However, the quality of the picture matches what you could expect from a highly professional Digital Betacam. Very small, light, sensitive, the DV cams (the other films of the series were shot with Sony PD100 cameras) give new possibilities to the directors. At Berlin the film was presented in a 35mm copy. Nobody noticed the video origin. This demonstrates that it is now possible to produce non-Dogma high quality films with mini DV cameras.

******SPOILERS******* Told are a few weeks in the life of an anthropology student named Claire, who is preparing for an examination. Claire's surrounded by a miserable bunch of people. But above all, she suffers from migraine and desperately she goes to see a new doctor. The name is Dr. Fish, thinking all medication for poison, except "Dr. Fish's Elexier'. Claire has to inhale it and everything shall be better. But nothing turns better. Examination is ahead, so after all Claire take shelter in a hospital. In her room in the hospital stay two other women. A younger one, Odette, is counting lovers instead of sheep, while she goes to sleep and the older one is Eleonore. Eleonore is quite senile already and there is a rumor, that she had rescued a baby out of an incubator, who's surprisingly feeling very well. Someday Claire, who balks approximations of Eleonore all the time, succumbs her strange kind of charm. She is accepting the old lady, encourage her silly rubbish and receives the magic of life. Happily she packs her suitcase and walks to the exit, where the horrible staff of her past is waiting: the parents, the lover, the little sister. Without further ado she escapes to her own life