Le roi des aulnes

Three actors that I love are here: John Malkovich, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gottfried John. There is also Dieter Laser, doing a role like only him can do. It's the work of a fine expert in cinematographic art, Volker Schlöndorff, who, in his youth, was the assistant of Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais, three huge talents. Schlöndorff's "The Tin Drum"(1979) is his masterpiece but, "The Ogre" too is also a great achievement and, this especially because of Malkovich, he is a human-locomotive for any film in each he is the lead. When he has a small role or just a cameo, he steals that film.

Through the eyes of a French man who never grew up, The Ogre depicts wartime life in Hitler's Germany. At the same time that the film takes up loaded questions of power and subjugation, recreating the process of recruitment and training for the Aryan army, it further challenges the viewer by presenting the growing Nazi regime in a very human way. A great deal of the variety in characterization and the breadth of reach can be attributed to the fairy-tale nature of this film. By introducing the character Abel as a troubled and weak youth, the film is able to trace his life's events under the spell of `Fate.' And indeed, Abel is sheltered and provided for throughout the course of events, even when faced with the most irrational of men. In film, characters are arguably always proponents of a few key traits, around which a believable person is constructed. In a fairy-tale, this is true to a greater extent. So of course, a combination of the two leads to a meeting of quite extreme characters. In The Ogre we are presented with a man who cares so much for children and animals that he is unable to see any evil in their presence. This oversight, or, in the heavy-handed symbolism of the film, blindness, is the basic motivation behind all events.

A great deal of the film is artfully done, with many subtle displacements to stimulate emotions in the viewer. Although the oft-mentioned 'front line' is never seen, instead we are faced with the massacre of hundreds of wild animals. The childhood friend of Abel returns to him in the form of the military official in the forest, and yet, Abel does not make a connection beyond a vague similarity. He is oblivious to the extravagant decadence of dipping one's hands in jewels, or keeping a wild cat for pleasure. In his simpleton's way he meanders through a landscape of potential knowledge, yet learns nothing. It is the viewer who is given the chance to learn what he can't. Unfortunately, this schema reminded me a bit too much of Forrest Gump. However, the film speaks a great deal to the fairy-tale effects of idealism and propaganda on young children, as finally Abel is cut off by the very boys he loved, their allegiance to a greater unseen force much stronger than their understanding of fellow man.

Known in English as "The Ogre" this has got to be John Malkovich's finest film to date. He plays an ignorant man, Abel, living in a small town at the dawn of the Nazi movement. He seems to be mentally slow, but emotionally heightened as has a great passion for the vitality of the children in the town. He is fond of photographing, especially children. However, due to a mis-understanding, because the people of the small town are so ignorant and afraid of the quiet lumbering Abel, he is sentenced to jail (undeservedly) for the crime of molesting a child. He is transferred to help with the war effort in France, and eventually comes to work for the Nazi party, "recruiting" children for the cause. He, however, does not seem to know what the Nazis stand for, or why he shouldn't be taking in children. He cares for the children as if they were his own, and is eventually persecuted for harbouring a young Jewish boy, which is when he begins to realise the ramifications of his plight.

A brilliantly scripted film (filmed in English despite the foreign origin). A must see. It saddens me, though that it is so difficult to find, and that it was never released in the US (as far as I know).

-jjj

One published reviewer said that Goring's character was written, and played, for comic effect. This complaint sounded plausible, but a glance in Encyclopedia Britannica reassures our confidence in the production's respect for authenticity. It suggests that Volker Spengler's characterization may be on the mark.

During Hitler's Putsch in 1923, Goring sustained a painful injury whose relief by means of morphine turned him into a drug addict nearly the rest of his life. This influence, in turn, made him "alternately elated or depressed; he was egocentric and bombastic, delighting in flamboyant clothes and uniforms, decorations, and exhibitionist jewelry." We see all these traits in Spengler's scenes, e.g. in his drunken alternation between a tirade and a blue funk at the fact that someone else had shot a stag that he wanted to shoot. When a soldier enters to bring him some really bad news, Goring is already so gloomy that he barely raises his hand from the table to salute, and his "Heil Hitler" is just a slurred grunt.

The article also establishes his corpulence and luxuriousness, to a point resented by his colleagues in the party. "His hunting interests enabled him to obtain a vast forest estate in the Schorfheide, north of Berlin, where from 1933 he developed a great baronial establishment" called Carinhall, full of artistic war booty, to which he retired whenever he could.

The film showed Goring as an often jovial man given, like Hitler, to occasional fits of imperious screaming. This behavior, according to one book I read recently, was to be expected of any top leader of the Third Reich not merely as a habit but as a deliberate technique. People outside of Germany were slow to take Hitler seriously as a threat because this conduct was so strange to them. They did not realize that German culture of the time regarded it as a standard part of the fatherly role. Therefore, as Hitler understood well, the more he screamed and shouted at his countrymen, the more closely they would identify him as a father figure and the embodiment of Der Vaterland.

Many superstitious beliefs have been associated with precious stones. The novel explains that Goring was not unique in imagining that plunging his fingers into a bowl of gems would drain away nervous energy and uncomfortable emotions. Other sources recount that when Hugo von Hofmannsthal's first poems appeared, under a pseudonym, they were so heavy with sensuous Weltschmerz that one critic declared they must have been written by an opulent old man while dipping his fingers in jewels. (He would soon be surprised that the poet was still a youth). So even this strange indulgence of Goring is in keeping with the ambient culture among those few who could afford the experience.

One could say much, much more about this complex film, but perhaps this elucidation of just one minor aspect suggests the multilayered care with which it has been put together.

Abel is not simply slow-witted, he is morally shortchanged and has little if any ability to recognize even the reality much less the depth of his willing collaboration with the Germans. Abel is a survivor and while his concern for the children being trained as proto-Nazis in an ancient castle is real, so is his ruthlessness in collecting them by force for his German superiors with the aid of snarling Dobermans.

The film abounds in caricatures beginning with an outdoor picnic by complacent, indeed moronic, French officers who fail to even remotely perceive the danger of the onrushing Wehrmacht. Reichsmarshall Goring is portrayed as a grinning fool except when he approaches the state of barking madness. This is a legitimate dramatic device but the real Goring, cured before World War II of doctor-induced morphine addiction, was more complex and, in that sense, more interesting (decades ago I took a psychology course with Dr. Gilbert, who examined Goring at Nuremberg and wrote a book about the experience which is still available in second-hand bookshops. HIS Goring was chilling, no one to laugh at.).

The film is most effective when it eerily recreates what must have been the almost erotic attraction of nighttime rallies with flags, bunting, torches and the steady beat of martial music. That little boys were inculcated with the madness of Nazism through these rituals is powerfully shown here.

It was hard for me to care about Abel one way or the other but the character is well-acted as are the other main roles.