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.

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. ;)

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.

This 1996 film, which was not released in the U.S. until 2000 in the rental market, offers a fresh German perspective of World War II. It puts a more human face on the people of the Third Reich, much in the same way as ‘Das Boot'. We are used to depictions of German soldiers as brutally evil, soulless killing machines (and there is a bit of that here) but this film mostly presents a softer more balanced portrayal.

This is the story of Abel, an affable simpleton from France with a love of children and animals (no, there are no undertones of pedophilia). Prior to WWII, he is wrongly accused and convicted of child molestation. While working in the work camps, he is captured by the Germans and through a series of events ends up as a prisoner of war worker in a training school for Hitler youth. He is emotionally seduced by the romantic notions of Hitler's national socialism and the great devotion to the fatherland that is being taught there. And of course, he loves working with the boys. The Germans notice this and how much the boys like him as well, so they ask him to recruit more boys for the school from the local countryside. Things go along well until the Russians invade and the only defense of the school must be made by the students (who are well trained in the art of war).

This is a terrific story that gives us a more realistic look inside Germany during the war. No, it wasn't an idyllic free society. But it wasn't exactly a factory for mechanized inhuman killers as it has been routinely portrayed either. We come to understand that what we considered evil was being presented to the children in terms that seemed good and noble. They felt as if they were on an idealistic quest, not on a diabolical mission of subjugation.

The direction of this film was expertly done. Volker Schlondorff's presentation of the story, though slow moving at times, offered an excellent character study of Abel and was patient in proffering revealing looks at the people and the feelings of those around him.

Malkovich is fantastic as the naïve and slow witted Abel. He is wonderfully childlike and sincere in his portrayal; reminiscent of his role in ‘Of Mice and Men'. This is the best I can remember him in quite some time.

This is a poignant and compelling film of substance. I rate it a 9/10. The sophisticated viewer will enjoy it.

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.