Volker Schlondorff's intermittently powerful "Ogre" stars John Malkovich as Abel Tiffauges, a seemingly mentally handicapped Frenchman who finds himself gallivanting across Europe during the Second World War.
Like his character in "Of Mice and Men", Malkovich plays Abel as a dim witted, obedient giant. Abel's only joy comes from tending to, protecting and helping children, a love that many in the film mistake for paedophilia.
Pretty soon Abel finds himself working for the Nazis, firstly at Hermann Goering's hunting lodge, and later at Kaltenborn Castle, an elite training camp for Hitler Youths. At both locations, Abel's fawning attitude toward children epitomises Nazi delirium. Nazism, like Abel's whole being, is a pathology bent upon preserving and protecting a certain "chosen people". It's an ethnic pathology which mirrors Abel's own drive to "photograph" and "preserve" a very specific, idealised view of youth and beauty. What the film stresses is how both stances operate in a cloistered, secluded realm in which the distinctions between the internal and the external world no longer hold, both Abel and Nazism creating fantasy, fairy-tale narratives for themselves and their believers. In this regard, everything Abel does, though benevolent and altruistic in his mind, leads to great violence. And so Abel, like the film's Nazis, is mild mannered, has little insight into his nature, lives in a fantasy world, always defers to authority, does not believe he is hurting anyone, and yet causes great harm. This "Nazi pathology" (the desire to "not see", a form of disavowal that is hard-wired into the very structure of modern life) is still very much a part of our modern, or post-modern, world.
The film ends with Abel rescuing a Jewish child. For Abel, love is by definition always never-ending and always excessive; he loves all children. This brings him in conflict with Nazi ideology, which, of course, demands that he kill the boy. This contradiction leads to Abel betraying his masters during the film's climax, and subsequently wading off into the sunset with the Jewish boy on his shoulders. Hauntingly, the duo think that they're protecting each other with magical powers. They are now each other's "chosen one", a stance which itself now foreshadows contemporary politics (protecting the Jew to protect oneself, protecting Israel to protect America).
Aesthetically, like Schlondorff's earlier film, "The Tin Drum", "The Ogre" takes the shape and tone of a dark, grisly fairy tale. Some passages recall both Goethe and the Brothers Grimm (and a hunting sequence Renoir's "The Rules of the Game"), though Schlondorff tones down his customary surrealism (and removes all sexual subplots present in the original tale), his eyes now on the more direct tastes of mass market, global (ie Western) audiences.
8/10 – Ranges from great to watered down and very poor, but Malkovich sucks us in. See Pasolini's "Salo".
Like his character in "Of Mice and Men", Malkovich plays Abel as a dim witted, obedient giant. Abel's only joy comes from tending to, protecting and helping children, a love that many in the film mistake for paedophilia.
Pretty soon Abel finds himself working for the Nazis, firstly at Hermann Goering's hunting lodge, and later at Kaltenborn Castle, an elite training camp for Hitler Youths. At both locations, Abel's fawning attitude toward children epitomises Nazi delirium. Nazism, like Abel's whole being, is a pathology bent upon preserving and protecting a certain "chosen people". It's an ethnic pathology which mirrors Abel's own drive to "photograph" and "preserve" a very specific, idealised view of youth and beauty. What the film stresses is how both stances operate in a cloistered, secluded realm in which the distinctions between the internal and the external world no longer hold, both Abel and Nazism creating fantasy, fairy-tale narratives for themselves and their believers. In this regard, everything Abel does, though benevolent and altruistic in his mind, leads to great violence. And so Abel, like the film's Nazis, is mild mannered, has little insight into his nature, lives in a fantasy world, always defers to authority, does not believe he is hurting anyone, and yet causes great harm. This "Nazi pathology" (the desire to "not see", a form of disavowal that is hard-wired into the very structure of modern life) is still very much a part of our modern, or post-modern, world.
The film ends with Abel rescuing a Jewish child. For Abel, love is by definition always never-ending and always excessive; he loves all children. This brings him in conflict with Nazi ideology, which, of course, demands that he kill the boy. This contradiction leads to Abel betraying his masters during the film's climax, and subsequently wading off into the sunset with the Jewish boy on his shoulders. Hauntingly, the duo think that they're protecting each other with magical powers. They are now each other's "chosen one", a stance which itself now foreshadows contemporary politics (protecting the Jew to protect oneself, protecting Israel to protect America).
Aesthetically, like Schlondorff's earlier film, "The Tin Drum", "The Ogre" takes the shape and tone of a dark, grisly fairy tale. Some passages recall both Goethe and the Brothers Grimm (and a hunting sequence Renoir's "The Rules of the Game"), though Schlondorff tones down his customary surrealism (and removes all sexual subplots present in the original tale), his eyes now on the more direct tastes of mass market, global (ie Western) audiences.
8/10 – Ranges from great to watered down and very poor, but Malkovich sucks us in. See Pasolini's "Salo".