YOUNG TORLESS (57)

Directed by: Volker Schlondorff (1966)

Starring: Mathieu Carrière, Bernd Tischer, Marian Seidowsky, Barbara Steele

The Pitch: At an exclusive boarding school, three of the boys systematically torture and humiliate a fourth after he's caught stealing and agrees to obey them blindly in exchange for their silence.

Theo Sez: Impossible to ignore the fact that this is a German-made film about power-mad Germans victimising a Jew (never made explicit, but hints are dropped, and the blond vs. swarthy faces are a statement in themselves). Yet it's really just a moral coming-of-age story, ending (surprisingly) in a kind of resigned relativism - no 'good' and 'bad' people, realises our hero, just the potential for both contained in everyone (this is how atrocities happen, he muses in a lengthy final speech) ; slightly problematic in this context, especially coupled with the fact that young Torless never really stands up to the other torturers - the best he can do is walk away, leaving them to it - even if he doesn't take part in the tortures (one recalls books like Daniel Goldhagen's "Hitler's Willing Executioners", on the WW2 collusion of the German people ; is the film a veiled justification of the German intellectual, those who stood by and watched with 'clean hands', as if observing a social experiment?). Better, and more accurate perhaps, to say that Schlondorff - still in his 20s when the film was made - wanted to move beyond the pious guilt of post-war German cinema, just as our hero moves beyond the simple logic of childhood to a new respect for the irrational (typified both in the discussion of "imaginary numbers" - an act of faith, explains his maths teacher - and, above all, in his own burgeoning sexuality) ; it's the rare coming-of-age film about certainties breaking down rather than coming together. Maybe that's why it's a little unsatisfying, or maybe it's all a bit too tentative - style not especially stylish, school interiors boxy and bare (memorable detail : the thin, uncomfortable-looking beds in the dormitory), minor characters like the acerbic whore or the one-legged teacher never fleshed out, heroes rather one-dimensional despite (half-hearted) attempts to make the tormented boy unsympathetic. Unusual nowadays in being so explicitly about moral questions - what makes a man, what's Good and Evil, etc - a refreshing change in the Age of Irony. Needed a touch of IF...-style anarchy, though.