O Jovem Törless

What's interesting about this film is the way it unapologetically removes the true and original gay content from the story. Torless has a passionate gay affair in the original. In the film gayness is alluded too as perhaps a contributing factor to the corruption of innocents via the pursuit & discovery of knowledge & experience. As a gay person with a broad understanding of the systematic exclusion and removal of gay people from history, the main theme of the film, re: the brutality , sadism and masochism & manifestation of fascism is somehow deeply compromised by the idea that it is excusable, if not absolutely impossible to reveal Torless's gay self as a positive and actual fact of his boyhood because it would offend European bourgeoisie taste of the 60s. So the sensationalism of fascism is portrayed and the recent anti-Semitic WW11 history of Austria 'allowed' as an allusion to it's part in Nazi history, but homosexuality is still being demonised and censored in a film which purports to be about anti-fascism. I don't buy that - and we've all been robbed of the true story - where Torless , far from being a dried up , cold 'acceptably' moral and suggestively straight prude, in the real story embraces the presence of gay feelings rampant in the original story and which contribute to the whole process of his crisis about morality which the film hijacks to portray a censored and acceptable message of it's own.

Young Törless is a pertinent reflection on good and evil and the way an individual behaves, given the lack of values in others.

In comparison with the moral and ethical values required by institutions, human behavior seems to follow an errant, amoral path, simply determined by chance, or the current of events. Especially when manifested in a group, human beings lose any values and act according to the tide. They practice excesses and suffer humiliations instinctively, as if they were a fatality of life.

The few who show the courage to remain faithful to fundamental values are marginalized, seen as outsiders, labeled as dreamers.

Being a German film from 1966, it is impossible not to relate this criticism to the rise and fall of Nazism, just 21 years earlier.

A film in which Volker Schlöndorff puts a finger on the wound of Nazism, still open in German society, and forces his compatriots to reflect on the mistakes of the past.

Faithfully adapted from author Robert Musil, this study of sadism and masochism among students at an Austro-Hungarian boys prep school is a parable of fascism and its origins. Barbara Steele is radiant and splendid as Bozena the prostitute who awakens the nascent sexual nature of the adolescent students. Lovingly photographed in black and white, YOUNG TORLESS evokes the mood and claustrophobic horror of the dehumanizing military system. Matthew Carriere gives an unblemished and heartfelt performance as an innocent caught behind the barbed wire walls of his very soul and the duty to which he has been placed. A must-see for everyone and an advocacy for pacificism. This was Volker Schloendorff's first film, and by admission one of Barbara Steele's favorite roles.

1. It's been said here that the gay content of the story has been removed. Well, the novel was released in 1905. We can nowadays interpret elements of the story in a gay context, but back then these notions did not exist. If Schlöndorff hints at homosexuality as an element of perversion, that is in fact faithful to the novel, which takes a strictly observatory, non-participating stance.

2. 'Törless' is often interpreted as an indicator of upcoming intolerance and Nazidom. Again, the novel was released at a much too early time to allow for such an interpretation; the novel's author Robert Musil certainly envisioned the inevitable fall of an empire stuck to tradition and incapable of accommodating personal liberties. Schlöndorff pushes some of the juvenile delinquents into similarities with the Nazis - albeit being carefully ambiguous about it -, but it would be wrong to consider this interpretation as a part of the original narrative.

3. 'Törless' is a highly psychological tale and film - again, Schlöndorff proves faithful to the novel in this respect. But this comes with the weakness of constructing characters around a certain social concept. It would be misleading to consider Törless and his rebellious friends as typical representatives of their era, or real figures upon which the author based his characters. As may be more obvious in Musil's masterpiece, 'The Man without Qualities', his characters are crafted to evoke rather a situation than a person; that makes his books almost impossible to adapt correctly.

Schlöndorff's film is somewhat middlebrow; it does not intend to be a substitute for reading the novel, but at the same time it carefully avoids to give the impression that it is anything but a rendition of it. That's not quite true; the interpretation is in the framing, the omissions of the subtext, and that the ideas upon watching the film differ considerably from those you get when you read the novel. One may call it therefore a failure - but an interesting failure to watch.

By today's standards, a film like "Young Torless" may seem too coy and archly philosophical (and thus pretentious) a take on the corruption of youth, and the sources from which the corruption stems. Its strength, however, lies in the telling: when a student at a preparatory academy robs a peer to pay off a debt, he finds himself enslaved, both psychologically and sexually, by a gang of rogues looking to push him to the breaking point. In the midst of this is Torless (Matthieu Carriere), a student coming to terms with his identity in the midst of this moral dilemma, and whose mental landscape renders him a frustrated, conflicted character who runs the gamut from cold detachment to vague sympathy. While certain aspects of the film (the homosexual subplot, for instance) seem deliberately repressed due to the era, the implication is enough to give the events an additional potency. The black-and-white cinematography is excellent, capturing a specific atmosphere of dread and meditative solitude--German director Volker Schlondorff is not looking to titillate with sensationalist content, but instead spin a story of a young adult's struggle with the evils of an imperfect world. And on that level, "Young Torless" is one of the best films of its kind.