Der Unhold

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This strange and original work is a French film about Nazi Germany done in English. There are no subtitles. Director Volker Schlondorff is German, the screenplay is by veteran French writer Jean-Claude-Carriere, who has scores of films to his credit including Bell de Jour (1967) and Valmont (1989), and the star is the American, John Malkovich, who plays a French simpleton named Abel Tiffauges who ends up as a servant in Field Marshall Herman Goering's hunting estate during World War II, and then later in a Hitler youth academy for boys.

Malkovich's Abel is enormously sympathetic because he has suffered but harbors no bitterness, because he genuinely loves children, and because he has a certain magic about him based on his childish belief that somehow he will survive any catastrophe. In a boy's home as a child he survives the brutality of a proto Goering-like fat boy, and then later as an auto mechanic he overcomes a false accusation of child molestation. Both of these little stories are vividly rendered and seem entirely realistic. Then begins Abel's war time adventures, and it is here that the story becomes, as some have observed, something of a fairy tale. Abel is able to leave his barracks at the prison to wander about where he meets a blind moose and then a German army officer at a deserted cabin in the woods. This leads to his being established at Goering's hunting estate, and from there to the Hitler youth academy where he is treated as a privileged servant. We see the Nazis as just another part of the bizarre personages of his world.

The depiction of Goering as a kind of self-indulgent Nero, living in opulence as the world burns, seemed entirely believable. The overall portrait of the Germans in an objective and balanced manner was refreshing and thought-provoking and one of the strengths of the film. The Nazi eugenicist is contrasted with the officer who was part of a failed plot against Hitler, both men enormously sincere and dedicated, the one unbalanced, the other unlucky.

This is not a film for those looking primarily to be entertained. This is a work of art, dark, uneven, and a bit curious.

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.

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.

The novel is so generous than it is just difficult to imagine a real fair adaptation. Or, more correct, an adaptation giving the real portrait of Abel Tiffauges. So, the film is more Volker Schlondorff than Michel Tournier. But, yes, John Malkovich gives just a beautiful job and, maybe, this is the only significant thing about this adaptation.

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.