“Indie” films really are the darlings of the hip film world. Take a film like Snow Angels, which probably won a bunch of awards at Sundance or some other festival. It has a cast of admired but not A-list actors who do a lot of indie work—Sam Rockwell, Tom Noonan, Griffin Dunne, Kate Beckinsale—and was filmed on a cheapo budget in an unnamed wintry small-town (possibly Another Wolfgang Staudte movie from DEFA, the 1952 Der Untertan (The Kaiser’s Lackey) is interesting for its historic parallels but not really engaging. It too is about a really unlikable character—the English title goes a long way to describing the slavishness of Diederich Hessling who has a petit-bourgeois upbringing in 1890s-turn of the century Germany (his father owns a paper factory), goes to University in Berlin to study chemistry, becomes a Herr Doktor, joins a dueling club, and is discharged from the army. He is a mean, expedient man. His politics are to the right of everybody and he worships Kaiser Wilhelm II above all else. Based on a novel by Heinrich Mann, the film’s character and his milieu are apparently meant to represent the sort of German who was responsible for the Nazis coming to power. This is unfair to lackeys everywhere. The film was cleared for showing in East Germany, according to the commentator on the DVD, but was banned for about 8 years in West Germany. Maybe it struck too close to home in a country full ex-Nazis.
Saw Danton again recently, the Andrzej Wajda (pic above taken in 1983 when Wajda was in NYC for a Danton press junket) movie made in France with French actors playing Danton and his friends and Polish actors in the roles of Robespierre and his friends. Danton and Robespierre are the great rivals in this story, each testing their power. The movie is in French, so I guess the Polish actors really speak French, learned it phonetically or were dubbed. Anyway, it is a good movie and worthy of being mentioned around the Quartorze de juillet. I suppose it is really more about the Polish situation at the time, 1983, when martial law ruled the country in order to suppress the strikes and unrest rather than the French revolution and its internecine squabbles among revolutionaries. Danton is the great crowd-pleasing orator who believes the masses support him and Robespierre the cold-hearted, calculating intellectual who wants to consolidate revolutionary power. The movie doesn't really come down on one side or the other. In the end it doesn't matter because both Danton and Robespierre were guillotined by their fellow revolutionaries.
No comments:
Post a Comment