Der Unhold

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

John Malkovich is doing a fine role here, as expected, and the movie depicts Europe around 1940 from the viewpoint of an emotionally challenged French orphan. You might have thought from the plot that it is about pedophiles or something similar. It is not. This guy moves from "prison" to prison, while happily doing the work assigned to him, all the time seeing the world as no one sees it. All his good deeds result in punishments and all his bad deeds make almost no impression on him. He perseveres in both.

The movie is spanning a few years of time and the rhythm is slow, as one would expect from a film made from a book, and, while a little boring and depressing, it is a nice movie.

Bottom line: imagine Forrest Gump in Europe. No humour, no hope, no cares in the world. Oh, except the war. ;)

Interesting film! Such a wealth of crucial questions, great performances - and yet, the final cohesion remains lacking here. The paradox of the enchantment of Nazism has been too little problematized in the cinema, and any attempt to say anything new on the subject is welcome. Schlöndorff does a cinematically good work, but where the film falters is in the way actual, brutal history and Abel's vision of Nazism as the Magic Kingdom are bound together. It's hard to pinpoint where the fault lies; there's just a sense of maybe trying too much at once. Anyway, an honorable and perhaps too multi-layered analysis of the 20th century nightmare.

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.