Word: basini
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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, the chief victim is Basini (Marian Seidowsky), a dim-witted boy who steals some money and then finds himself blackmailed into blind obedience by his discoverers. Nightly, in an attic over the dormitory, the two young extortionists sadistically beat Basini, who submits to every indignity with the passivity of a pack horse...
...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...