The Ogre

Interesting film! Such a wealth of crucial questions, great performances - and yet, the final cohesion remains lacking here. The paradox of the enchantment of Nazism has been too little problematized in the cinema, and any attempt to say anything new on the subject is welcome. Schlöndorff does a cinematically good work, but where the film falters is in the way actual, brutal history and Abel's vision of Nazism as the Magic Kingdom are bound together. It's hard to pinpoint where the fault lies; there's just a sense of maybe trying too much at once. Anyway, an honorable and perhaps too multi-layered analysis of the 20th century nightmare.

Abel is not simply slow-witted, he is morally shortchanged and has little if any ability to recognize even the reality much less the depth of his willing collaboration with the Germans. Abel is a survivor and while his concern for the children being trained as proto-Nazis in an ancient castle is real, so is his ruthlessness in collecting them by force for his German superiors with the aid of snarling Dobermans.

The film abounds in caricatures beginning with an outdoor picnic by complacent, indeed moronic, French officers who fail to even remotely perceive the danger of the onrushing Wehrmacht. Reichsmarshall Goring is portrayed as a grinning fool except when he approaches the state of barking madness. This is a legitimate dramatic device but the real Goring, cured before World War II of doctor-induced morphine addiction, was more complex and, in that sense, more interesting (decades ago I took a psychology course with Dr. Gilbert, who examined Goring at Nuremberg and wrote a book about the experience which is still available in second-hand bookshops. HIS Goring was chilling, no one to laugh at.).

The film is most effective when it eerily recreates what must have been the almost erotic attraction of nighttime rallies with flags, bunting, torches and the steady beat of martial music. That little boys were inculcated with the madness of Nazism through these rituals is powerfully shown here.

It was hard for me to care about Abel one way or the other but the character is well-acted as are the other main roles.

Three actors that I love are here: John Malkovich, Armin Mueller-Stahl, Gottfried John. There is also Dieter Laser, doing a role like only him can do. It's the work of a fine expert in cinematographic art, Volker Schlöndorff, who, in his youth, was the assistant of Louis Malle, Jean-Pierre Melville and Alain Resnais, three huge talents. Schlöndorff's "The Tin Drum"(1979) is his masterpiece but, "The Ogre" too is also a great achievement and, this especially because of Malkovich, he is a human-locomotive for any film in each he is the lead. When he has a small role or just a cameo, he steals that film.

Known in English as "The Ogre" this has got to be John Malkovich's finest film to date. He plays an ignorant man, Abel, living in a small town at the dawn of the Nazi movement. He seems to be mentally slow, but emotionally heightened as has a great passion for the vitality of the children in the town. He is fond of photographing, especially children. However, due to a mis-understanding, because the people of the small town are so ignorant and afraid of the quiet lumbering Abel, he is sentenced to jail (undeservedly) for the crime of molesting a child. He is transferred to help with the war effort in France, and eventually comes to work for the Nazi party, "recruiting" children for the cause. He, however, does not seem to know what the Nazis stand for, or why he shouldn't be taking in children. He cares for the children as if they were his own, and is eventually persecuted for harbouring a young Jewish boy, which is when he begins to realise the ramifications of his plight.

A brilliantly scripted film (filmed in English despite the foreign origin). A must see. It saddens me, though that it is so difficult to find, and that it was never released in the US (as far as I know).

-jjj

The novel is so generous than it is just difficult to imagine a real fair adaptation. Or, more correct, an adaptation giving the real portrait of Abel Tiffauges. So, the film is more Volker Schlondorff than Michel Tournier. But, yes, John Malkovich gives just a beautiful job and, maybe, this is the only significant thing about this adaptation.