![]() ![]() As with the recently screened Love in Thoughts, about male friends who regard true love as more important than life itself, Friedrich and Albrecht become each other's consciences, soulmates who cannot survive alone in Governor Stein's Dracula's-castle-like school. Schilling, last seen as the anarchistic young photographer stalking his pompous Green Party pop in Agnes and His Brothers, has the Vitalis-slick good looks and porcupine-prickly moral acuity of a young Jimmy Stewart. Albrecht is a skinny, introspective youth who's fought a losing battle for the love of his thuggish dad, Governor Heinrich Stein (Justus Von Dohnanyi). Only when Friedrich meets Albrecht Stein (Tom Schilling) is his soul given the same rigorous workout. Riemelt is superb as a lad who can ricochet between affectionate older brother to pitiless ring opponent. Max Riemelt is radiant as a blonde boy in a candy store of boyish delights: one-on-one boxing lessons with his own personal trainer, hang-gliding over a countryside that is yet to be pocked with the fallout of war. ![]() A pudgy meatpacker's son is taunted about pin-ups and liverwurst a chronic bedwetter finds a brutally ironic way to give his life for his Fuhrer and we get a graphic demonstration of why a live grenade should not be placed in the hands of just any mother's son. Director Gensel says part of his reason for making the film was the realization that his own grandfather and thousands of the leaders of postwar West Germany were originally trained in this manner to serve the 1,000-year Reich.įriedrich soon settles into the sado-masochistic rituals that are endemic to boys' schools everywhere - see Taps, The Chocolate War, Annapolis, and Harry Potter. The line between good and bad Germans is as murky, perhaps, as the line between "good" and "bad" Americans today. There is "good" Heinrich, the boxing trainer, and "bad" Heinrich, the school's bloodthirsty headmaster. Throughout Before the Fall, the filmmakers make nuanced distinctions between genuine Nazis and Germans who went along out of fear or in service of other ambitions. Friedrich loses the match but manages to attract the attention of Napola recruiter Heinrich Vogler (Devid Striesow), who tells the boy that the route to a national boxing title runs through this Hitler academy. One day, Friedrich finds himself matched up against a young brute from nearby Napola, a Hitler-sanctioned military prep school specializing in mass-producing little Fuehrers. Gensel's film (written with Maggie Peren) employs homoerotic beats and imagery to explicate the inner lives and sublime passions of characters who are not overtly homosexual, but whose deep, platonic love is the only shield between themselves and the devil who's paying their tuition.įriedrich Weimer (Max Riemelt) is a 16-year-old apprentice steelworker who manages to snatch a few precious hours at a local boxing gym in-between shoveling coal and taking shit from his authoritarian father. In Before the Fall, Dennis Gensel's intoxicating, haunting portrait of German teenage boys training, in effect, to be brides of Hitler, a soulful young man who wants to be a poet in defiance of his own Hermann Goring-like father sacrifices himself to save the soul of his best friend. A beautiful boy - his lips bloated to bluish red by freezing water, his eyes bidding an urgent farewell - turns into a ghost before our eyes in one of the most startlingly erotic moments in any film seen this year, the climax of a new German history film with disturbing parallels to our own messy times. ![]()
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