V icky Krieps broke into cinema fifteen years ago with the short film X on a map, and since then, this ethereally beautiful 40-year-old Luxembourgish actress has become a must-have in auteur cinema european In just seven years, since he became known to the general public in The Invisible Thread, by Paul Thomas Anderson, he has recently specialized in historical roles. From that of Karl Marx’s wife in The Young Karl Marx to her acclaimed performance as Sissi in The Rebel Empress, through her Queen Anne of Austria in the French blockbuster The Three Musketeers. His new challenge is to put himself in the shoes of the Austrian poet and writer Ingeborg Bachmann under the command of Margarethe von Trotta in Viatge al desert, a film that arrived in Spanish cinemas this Friday after its passage through the section official of the Berlin Festival last year.
The story focuses on a very specific stage in the life of this outstanding writer in the German language of the 20th century, who died at the age of 47 as a result of burns in a fire, the origin of which has never been fully clarified. Specifically, at the moment she meets the famous playwright Max Frisch, a relationship that ended badly and which led her to suffer depression from which she was cured thanks to a trip to the Egyptian desert. “It is a paradox that women as strong and independent as Tina Turner, Nina Simone or Whitney Houston ended up in a relationship with toxic men who oppressed and abused them”, declares Krieps.
“If you want to tell a woman that she is wonderful, independent and strong, it will take a long time to convince her. But if you want to tell him that he’s weak, it won’t cost you that much. It’s a phenomenon that has a lot to do with the way women have been educated over time, but I’ve always been surprised by how great female minds have submitted in this way.”
When Bachmann meets Frisch, she is a well-known and respected artist. Quite a star who has already conquered with his poetry the bastion dominated by the men of literature in the German language. Frisch seduces her, says he admires her and invites her to live with him in Zurich. She was a free soul, an independent woman who ended up coming face to face with the jealousy of a man 15 years older who did not respect her space. “I think Ingeborg thought Frisch would respect her.”
The film does not point out that Ingeborg’s parents were avowed Nazis, something that disgusted the writer. “She knew that very everyday words can become a weapon of mass destruction. This is what the Nazis did. They used words, created propaganda that the world had never seen, and suddenly they were in control of the people. She was aware of the exact weight of each word, how it could save or damn us. There was a lot of pain in his words. And at the same time, his thirst and his obsessive faith in utopia also came into play, something that I also share”, confesses the performer, who has admired Bachmann’s work since high school. Therefore, when Von Trotta sent him the script, he did not hesitate to accept the proposal.
Ingeborg always said she didn’t want to get married. He believed that marriage was “an institution incompatible with a woman who works, thinks and acts freely. Fascism always begins between men and women. What he observed is that fascism can appear at home and often starts in the little things. And as long as we don’t realize that we’ll never understand the bigger picture, and that’s really a really great thing that she did and at the time she helped people change their way of thinking.”
Krieps believes that there is a lot of mystery surrounding the character he has embodied. In fact, “I feel that I am also a mystery to myself”. The invisible thread opened the doors of Hollywood. Still, Krieps preferred to return to Europe. “Intuition told me not to stay in Hollywood. And I don’t regret it. The films I have made in Europe help me find my voice and my place in this profession. They make me feel freer. And in Hollywood I never felt that freedom.”
