Der Fangschuß

Der Fangschu

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Der Fangschu Review

In the first shot we see Konrad and Erich running through the snow at midnight. They are both Prussian officers who have been reassigned to Konrad's ancestral home and though they arrive under a veil of mortar fire and flares, the mood is one of a midnight frolic between two lovers. When the two enter Konrads home they are greeted by what is left of Konrad's family as if they were two students who have been away at boarding school. And, although the home is a sprawling manor with wings of rooms stretching off in every direction, that night the two sleep in the same room in beds that are only a few feet apart. The next day Konrad tours the grounds of the estate with his sister Sophie and the way Schlondorff situates the two so naturally at one with the land we come to see that these ancestral lands have sacred connotations for these two. Each scene is immaculately composed and richly evocative as anything by Jean-Pierre Melville (Schlondorff dedicates the film to Melville) or Robert Bresson. Even though the film was actually made in 1976 Schlondorff elects to use black and white and the beauty of one black and white composition after another is simply stunning. Some of these compositions also recall some of Bergmans early films. After seeing his adaptations of Musil's Young Torless (1968) and now this adaptation of Yourcenar's Le Coup de Grace (1976) as well as the later Tin Drum (1979) it is clear to me that Volker Schlondorff is a master of the literary adaptation--he not only brings literary material to life (which is no easy feat for the richness of a narrative rarely translates well to screen) but with his carefully composed shots he often foregrounds things that may have been in the original text but that never caught our attention as they do when visualized. There is plenty of dialogue in this film and much literal content (not the least of which is this ripely realized historical moment) to ponder but Schlondorff visualizes each scene with such care and brings about such precise effects that I am tempted to say he exceeds the original texts with which he works.

The cinematography is of the very highest order and the thing that I continue to be impressed by and that lingers in my brain even a day and a half after I watched the film. The other impressive thing about this film is the acting and particularly the performance by Margarethe von Totta who plays Sophie. Since their parents are dead and since Konrad has been away it has fallen on Sophie's shoulders to keep the estate together but we soon find out that the troops that have been stationed at the house have not always treated her with much respect. So when Konrad returns with Erich it is immediately apparent that she feels a great sense of relief that she will no longer have to live unprotected in her home which has been appropriated by officers and now even resembles an officers club or worse, a barracks. It is also obvious that Sophie still holds a flame for Erich who was both Konrad's and her own boyhood friend. But Erich is a complex creature suffering his own wartime wounds and while both Konrad and Sophie (whose estate remains relatively intact) realize that a new age is dawning in Europe, Erich (whose family estate has already been obliterated by war) still clings to those old world order ideals like duty & asceticism as well to the the old hierarchy that preserves those clear social markers that the new world seeks to obliterate. Even though it is Konrad's house, its is Erich who lords it over the rest of the troops and servants; he clings to the war because only so long as the war lingers on will his link with the old world and its anachronistic ideals be preserved. Erich sees himself as the prince of the castle and even though Sophie seems to realize that after the war there will be no more princes and no more castles, and even though her politics favor this transformation of old world to new, she still finds herself irresistably drawn to this old world relic. Perhaps she is drawn to him because he reminds her of the past and is her only link to a time when she felt that her life was rooted and her world secure. But the only desire Erich feels is for Konrad who he imagines to be a Knight like himself--even though, alas, each time we see Konrad he seems to wither away further and further and not so much from his own war wounds as from the awareness of his own insignificance. It is a doomed aristocratic lover's triangle and what they all share is the common fate that none of their desires will ever be fulfilled. It is perhaps no fault of their own that they happen to be aristocrats in a time when aristocrats are rapidly becoming obsolete and are even targeted for being what they are, but their inability to adapt also, at times anyway, appears to be a personal failure for these old world aristocrats simply refuse to function in a world that follows no reliable patterns or set codes of behavoir.

The entire aesthetic of the film seems designed to illustrate the disconnect between each of the respective aristocrat's anachronsitic world views and reality. Again, it is not surprising that Schlondorff dedicated the film to Jean-Pierre Melville as it feels like an early Melville film in the way that it combines two seemingly disparate elements-- a classically, almost clinically, objective lens framing an almost faerytale like trio of privileged aristocrats lost in their own subjective relation to people and things. (I'm thinking here of Le Silence de la Mer & Les Enfants Terribles.) Schlondorff, like Melville before him, is brilliant at showing how each of his characters fail to connect with the outside world and how each of them are lost in their fantasy of what the world should be or once was. Erich still wants to live like a Teutonic Knight and the war allows him to foster that fantasy; Konrad is lost in an equally juvenile fantasy as he believes, or at least entertains the illusion for a short while, that once the war is over the new lords of the world will be artists and poets; but Sophie is perhaps the most tragic of the three because though she does not believe in the old order anymore, she also seems incapable of mustering any new belief in anything or allowing herself even the meagerest of new world illusions to replace the richness of the old world ones. Unlike the men she is incapable of self-deception. Finally, unlike her brother who simply fades out of life without a fight, she at least has the dignity of lucidity and leaves the world knowing full well that for her there is no life in this new world and that extinction is the only fate available to her. Margarethe von Trotta's deeply nuanced performance as the multi-faceted (victimized, hysterical, needy, seductive, vengeful, idealistic, reckless, nihilistic, resigned...) Sophie is unforgettable.

The final irony is that Erich, in a last and futile attempt to preserve the flame of a dying world, is the one who deals the final blow that ends that world forever.

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