Word: torless
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...Drum was guaranteed of commercial success in Germany because of the novel's popularity. Grass resisted all offers for the film rights to his book for 15 years until he decided he had met, finally, the right man to direct Oskar's story. Schlondorff (whose past films include Young Torless and The Lost Honor of Katherin Blum) asked sharp questions, Grass noted, and made no plans to significantly alter his book for the screen...
...schoolboys as a microcosm is hardly new. From The Lord of the Flies to Young Torless to If . . . . the metaphor is made and remade until it seems ready to become a staple of film culture, like the western. The Boys of Paul Street, a joint U.S.-Hungarian production, maintains the tradition without illuminating it. Still, its decelerated rhythms and nostalgic photography provide a rare glimpse of that era when good and evil were different colors and student protest was a whispered grievance in a corridor...
Young Topless is a painstakingly accurate re-creation of life in a military school of imperial Austria. Torless (Matthieu Carriere) is a sensitive boy-the despair of his father and the overweening hope of his mother-who begins his scholastic career at a noted academy. Hardly has he buttoned up his tunic when he begins to sense that military intelligence is a contradiction in terms. His professors are interested in order, not in knowledge; most of his fellow students are toadies and bullies who pervert the authority over them by victimizing those under them. In Tor-less' class...
...Torless never engages in the brutality, but he becomes a pliant onlooker-revolted by sadism, yet unwilling to murmur a word to the authorities. Even tually, the boys' nocturnal brutality cannot be contained in an attic; during one hysterical afternoon, the entire student body participates in an orgy of cruelty and hangs Basini by the heels...
...times, Director Volker Schlondorff tries all too obviously to point up parallels between the violence of the academy and life in Hitler's Germany -as when Torless rather ponderously testifies at a school-board inquiry into Basini's death that "there is no boundary between a good world and an evil world: they run together and very normal people can spread terror." Otherwise, Young Torless, adapted from the novel by Robert Musil, is a perfect-and perfectly chilling-evocation of the underside of a vanished...
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