Bachfeuer

This is a plea for there to be an English subtitled version. I saw it at German Society of PA Friday Film Night. Why has it stuck with me? It speaks to the winding down of the Me Too movement. The accused is a mature, accomplished man engaged in a long-term extramarital affair. By not leaving his wife, he disappoints the complainant. His alleged failure to stop the consentual sex when she told him to one day formed the flimsy basis for a rape accusation. Dramatic license is employed to good effect.

On one level, it shows how the rights of the accused can be neglected in that court system. Anatomia di una caduta (2023) has something similar as to the French court system.

There is a smart alec lawyer named Biegler: a reference to the defense lawyer in Anatomia di un omicidio (1959).

In EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM, Adolf Eichmann came off as a plain, inarticulate, incongruously normal little man. The phrase, "banality of evil" came to stand for it. That phrase has been widely misunderstood as encapsulating some profound, counterinuitive insight about the Holocaust. It does not. It is merely Arendt's observation specific to Eichmann, and to all the little cog-in-the-machine people whom he epitomized.. It has mostly been forgotten that the Mossad mission to Argentina in '56 was intended to capture Eichmann and Dr. Josef Mengele together. But Mengele dropped out of sight, to surface later in Brazil. He was never brought to justice. He drowned accidentally off a gorgeous Brazilian beach while vacationing in 1979. Because he exhibited essential elements that Eichmann lacked--perversion of a privileged, cultured upbringing as well as science and medicine--he ought to have been the man on trial in the glass booth. Had that succeeded, we would have heard far less about "banality of evil" down through the years.

This is the only one of this season's Oscars crop that hooked me. As a film buff, the allusions and homages are myriad. (If one just takes it at face value, I suppose the characters are a bit too unlikable.) It is like Cinderella, except that instead of a coach that turns into a pumpkin, there is a prince who turns into a toad. To me, it is a latter-day iteration of the Camille/La Traviata story. A few days after seeing it, I happened to catch Femmine di lusso (1930)-the same story in a different era. Both films have the downward-mobile scion of a powerful and wealthy family becoming enamored with a hooker and proposing to marry her, thereby mobilizing the family to attempt to put a stop to the relationship and to buy the hooker off. Both films have the hooker finding herself no match for the scion's dynamic, domineering mom. Both have a significant supporting male character affecting the hooker's life. Both have a third-act chase sequence, and an all-stops-pulled-out finish that one can't see coming. Ms. Madison reminds me of Charlotte Gainsbourg--a hard charging force of nature like Barbara Stanwyck, Susan Hayward, Demi Moore, and a select few others. I find her past work interesting, and look forward expectantly to her future work.