Maria Reiche: The secret of the Nazca lines movie review

To date, the legendary “Nazca lines” have lost none of their mysterious aura. The huge scraps with their lines, patterns and figures, scratched by indigenous peoples in the Peruvian desert floor, could have a religious meaning, and a connection to astronomy is also conceivable. The controversial para scientist Erich von Däniken published a particularly adventurous thesis in his book “Memories of the Future” (1968). After that, the scraps would be something like the runway markings for extraterrestrial astronauts.

At the time, however, nobody came up with the obvious idea of ​​questioning the still active specialist on this topic: the German Maria Reiche, called “Lady Nazca” (also the original title of “Maria Reiche: The Secret of the Nazca Lines”), which had been researching the mysterious patterns since the 1930s and was now responsible for the figuries that the figures have now been UNESCO World Heritage. As a Franco-German co-production directed by Damien Dorsaz, the biopic is now coming to the cinema.

Maria Reiche (Devrim Lingnau) came to Peru in the early 1930s as a young math teacher from Germany to teach at a private school. She lives with her friend Amy (Olivia Ross), who, as a busy party girl, ensures that Maria meets people, including the French archaeologist Paul (Guillaume Gallienne), for whom Mary is a translator. Maria even visits him in his excavations in the Peruvian desert near the city of Nazca. There she discovers mysterious scraps that lead lines through the landscape as a straight lines and sometimes end in complicated patterns and figures.

But what is their meaning? Maria is fascinated and this fascination will no longer let her go. All by herself, she releases the lines, which looks like she sweeps the desert from afar – and soon she is widely known as crazy people who put it in the head to decrypt the secret of the scraps. In wind and weather, she misses, draws and cartographed the lines and makes them known in the scientific world. And finally she causes the lines of Nazca as a cultural asset under the protection of the government …

Too much compression

A real adventurer was Maria Reiche, it seems, with a great passion that she couldn't dissuade anything and nobody. So not only an obsessed scientist who was ready to sacrifice everything else for her research, but also a rather interesting personality. Only of this can be found in the cinema debut of Damien Dorsaz about Maria Reiches life, unfortunately, little or nothing. Only that Maria Reiche was a loner who apparently felt most comfortable in the glutin heat of the Peruvian desert is reasonably clear. In addition, the film evaporates the real period of around 30 years from Mary's arrival in Peru to the protection of the Scharf pictures by the Peruvian parliament on an unclear framework of a maximum of a few years.

This is actually a real history of history. It is precisely this decades of insistence, this scientifically related stubbornness that characterized Maria Reiche's life. Why this aspect is taken away remains the secret of Damien Dorsaz and bland drouard, who are responsible for the script together. At least in this way Devrim Lingnau (“Hysteria”) can remain in the game without age with the help of special effects or makeup tricks. But even if she tries to breathe life into her role, she succeeds only very limited in the pictures, which she shows lonely and under the ruthless desert sun when exposed and measured by the lines. Because that alone does not make the figure interesting in the long run.

The action is becoming more and more irrelevant, and then, probably due to a certain boredom, the action appears increasingly practical questions when it comes to: Why is it not brown? Why does she actually get sunburn with her light skin in the embers? Why doesn't she attract practical clothes, but only these fluttering summer dresses? More and more is wrong here or it seems to be irrelevant to those involved, so that it ultimately works as if neither the director nor the co-author really found access to the person of Maria and to this film.

Almost from the beginning there is no spark that could skip, the story sometimes looks like it was reluctantly cobbled together. Not even the only traditional great appearance by adventurer Maria Reiche is granted her. In reality, at the no longer tender age of 52, she had a large plate camera around her stomach on the runners of a helicopter to photograph the Nazca lines from above. This scene is completely missing, instead artificial conflicts are constructed with her life partner Amy to somehow fill the plot, but these pictures also remain bloodless and uninspired. The foundations are simply missing, Maria's character is unclear from the start, and the film is neither possible in terms of action nor visually to create a coherent atmosphere.

Access to the title heroine is missing

The fact that a film was made about Maria Reiche is probably thanks to the current fashion of the “women's biopics”: more or less true stories about women whose performance has not yet been recognized in detail. “Hidden Figures” (2016) Over three black mathematicians in the US room ride may have set a trend here that still works. However, the actually good idea also means that filmmographies such as “The Messenger of the Pope” or (worse) “Sound of Hope” are created, in which women are unnecessarily glorified and emotional. “Maria Reiche: The Secret of the Nazca Lines” could also fit in this picture, if there was a touch of feeling in addition to the glory.

Conclusion: lifeless, listless, juice and weak. Too bad.