The Austrian director Stefan Ruzowitzky imagines a thriller whose protagonists are soldiers returned from the Great War, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
by Jacques Mandelbaum
What makes the emergence of a German serial killer think in the smoking meanders of the butcher’s shop of 1914-1918 and the Méphitique atmosphere of the Weimar Republic? To the following war, of course, undoubtedly worse, with his mass death, his genocide, his moral abomination. Fritz Lang thought about it even before she admitted, with her masterpiece M Le Curses (1931), notably inspired by the misdeeds of Peter Kürten (1883-1931), alias “the vampire of Düsseldorf”. Romuald Karmakar returned to an exciting film entitled Der Totmacher (1995), inspired by the protocol established by the psychiatrist who questioned Fritz Haarmann (1879-1925), alias “Le Boucher de Hanover”, during his detention. The two men were the two most famous German serial killers of the 1920s.
Stefan Ruzowitzky, 61, Austrian director who led a piece of career in the United States, little known in our latitudes, takes up the thread of this frame, adapting it to the Austrian context. His scenario, however, is of pure fiction and imagines the return of the front of a group of prisoners of war, wrugled, bitter and humiliated, both by these years of combat and by the defeat which makes them enter a country which was still A huge empire at the beginning of the conflict.
formal challenge
It is in this group of survivors that a mysterious serial killer chooses his victims, dependent on Peter Perg, one of them and, moreover, police inspector before the war, to put him The hand at the collar. He will be seconded in this task by his ex-colleague, Commissioner Severin, as well as by the forensic doctor Theresa Körner, prototype of the woman to come from the Roaring Twenties.
Endowing his account with all the historical notations of circumstance (revolutionary bubbling, imperial ruins, old world which goes out, anger and humiliation of the people, anti -Semitism, push of communism and Nazism), the director above all put the Accent on a formal challenge: shooting in the background with the actors and digitally reconstructing the post-war Vienne with, as a reference, the expressionist films of the very time (copy, the firm of Doctor Caligari, by Robert Wiene, of 1920).
The result – with its oblique perspectives, its lead light and its distorted buildings – refers less to the cinematographic universe in perpetual inception (2010), by Christopher Nolan, than a decoration of dystopian comics in which we would have inserted characters who give the impression of being in cardboard. The exercise of style thus takes precedence over the staging, giving this film an undoubtedly original identity, but a little anecdotal.
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