Young Torless - Criterion Collection

Starring:Mathieu CarriÃ¨re, Marian Seidowsky, Bernd Tischer, Fred Dietz, Lotte Ledl, Jean Launay, Barbara Steele, Fritz Gehlen, Hanna Axmann-Rezzori, Herbert Asmodi
Director: Volker SchlÃ¶ndorff
Studio: Criterion
Product Type: DVD

Description

At an Austrian boys' boarding school in the early 1900s, shy, intelligent Törless observes the sadistic behavior of his fellow students, doing nothing to help a victimized classmate—until the torture goes too far.

Customer Reviews:

I have an ambiguous feeling about this.......2006-10-27

Early in the film, Torless' math teacher tells him everything comes down to feelings, even mathematics. Then two of Torless' friends start torturing Basini for stealing. Torless watches, pondering the nature of good and evil while Basini is beaten, stabbed and hung. It's kind of like a sadistic version of "My Night at Maud's," where violence instead of sex is the problem, or maybe more like that Matt Dillion movie, "My Bodyguard," only here instead of saving Basini, the Linderman character is questioned before his professors where they decide he's too intellectually ambitious for their school and they ship him off to somewhere fancier. Basini gets a wedgie, but since he doesn't know what a good education really is, he doesn't seem to mind too much.

Classic of post-war German cinema . . ........2006-06-08

Shot in crisply elegant black and white, this 1966 film is a parable about good and evil, guilt and innocence, set in a remote Austro-Hungarian boys school at the turn of the last century. Its message recalls another story, "Lord of the Flies," in which morality disappears as its young characters are free to yield to their baser instincts. This 2005 re-release on DVD includes an informative interview with director Volker Schlýndorff who tells of his decision to film the story as a bridge to pre-Nazi era cinema (Pabst, Lang, Wilder) and as a way to explore cinematically the lapse of morality that brought Hitler to power. Observed up close, he says, the borderline between good and evil disappears, and this is the lesson that the young student Týrless learns.

The DVD includes Schlýndorff's discussion of composer Hans Werner Henze's film score. Using primitive instruments, it provides a stark and melancholy counterpoint to the scenes and images, and the DVD reproduces it as a single intact suite, which you can listen to separate from the film. In wide screen with easy-to-read English subtitles, it's a thoughtfully disturbing reminder of the deeply affecting films produced in Europe in the decades following WWII.

a film that is hard to watch.......2005-05-03

This review is for the Criterion Collection DVD edition of the film.

"Young Törless" or "Der Junge Törless" as it is called in Germany is Volker Schlöndorff's first feature length film. It is based on a novel by Robert Musil and depicts a student at a military school in pre World War I Austria-Hungary. It takes the idea of bullying at school to an extreme even by today's standards.

I found it difficult to watch as it reminded of how I was bullied when I was a student. Although it never reached the level depicted in this film, it did bring back memories.

Some of the scenes were nice and it was interesting to see how a film made in the 1960's depicted a European boarding school of the 1910's.

The DVD has some nice special features also.

There is an interview with the film's director, a theatrical trailer, a stills gallery of behind the scenes photos, and a presentation of the film's musical score.

This is a good film to bring awareness of bullying in school and should be seen by school administrators.

Schlendorff's First is a Masterpiece.......2005-04-10

Robert Musil's "Confusions of Young Törless" was published in 1906, the twilight of 19th century certainties (Freud published "Studies in Hysteria" in 1895, "Interpretation of Dreams" in 1900; Franz Wedekind's "Spring Awakening" was published in 1890, first produced in 1906, and banned in 1908; Einstein's General Theory was less than a decade away), in Austria-Hungary, a semi-faux empire taking too long to rot away. The greatness of Musil's work lies in its distillation of the zeitgeist into a relatively simple narrative about an incident of abuse in a boys' academy. Once on paper, the novel (at times a meditation) transcends time and place, and makes a statement about adults and children dealing with passion, knowledge, order and justice, while trying to grasp within themselves that which in themselves they can neither control nor fully understand (ergo the metaphoric use of discussions about imaginary numbers) finally resorting to rationalization, dogma and discipline. Törless, his companions, his teachers and the school chaplain struggle in darkness, deluding themselves as having been truly enlightened in some fashion by experience, whereas each in their own way, seeks only to quiet internal turmoil and restore comprehensible order. Whatever else, the work is extremely ironic, nowhere more than in its title, as "Confusions" are not limited to Young Törless but to the whole world around him. Musil was 26 when it was published.

Schlendorf's film captures all of this. With one important caveat, it is an extremely faithful rendering of the novel and its spirit. The austere black and white photography, the faithfully sparse setting, the economical dialogue, strip the film to bare essentials: nothing distracts from its core. It is excellently acted. The caveat is sex. Sex is a pervasive and disruptive force throughout Musil's novel. At one point, Törless is sexually aroused when witnessing abuse. Beineberg, Reiting and Törless individually, albeit differently, use Basini sexually. Basini uses his sexuality to press his case with Törless; Törless rationalizes his own acquiescence. All four use the town whore. Part of Törless "confusions" is his intellectualization of his own sexual turbulence: does he act this or that way because what he thinks, or do his feelings shape his thoughts which then rationalize his actions? It is not a question of sexual identity as one would face in early 21st century, but an awareness of the disruptive power of passion within him. Schlendorff does not betray Musil, but, other than with the whore, sexuality is handled through cursory dialogue and inference, less centrally and pervasively than in the novel. The film was made in 1966; perhaps today it would be made differently, the challenge remaining to make it at least as well. Another, if unintended, irony about a work published sixty years before the masterful film was made.

The thoroughly anachronistic score by Hans Werner Henze reinforces the universal and timeless predicament the film depicts. Neither I nor, I think, Schlendorff see a premonition of Nazism in Musil's novel; such inference obscures meaning, deflects relevance and diminishes the work. What was true and relevant in the 1906 text remains true and relevant today. "Confusion" can still be apt description for humankind: arguably, the delusions, contradictions, and self-righteousness in contemporary America provide a good example. In the end, there is a touch of smugness to the irony with which Young Törless concludes, a detachment in both Musil and Schlendorff, which translates as apprehensive harbinger of our expanding awareness of ourselves, of what we can do, and of the absurdly infinite capacity and recondite ways we find to grant ourselves absolution. "Yes we can..." a frightening thought indeed.

The Criterion CD, again, as in all their editions, is pristine; truly a product of high quality.

A cult movie!.......2005-04-08

Based on a Robert Musil's novel Die Verwirrungen des Zoglings Torless was the source for this allegorical German film. Somehow this film was the real leap to this raisng and promising actor: Mathieu Carriere, who plays Torless, a student in a costly boarding school during the glory days of the Hapsburg Empire. While at school, Carriere is a bystander to the sadistic behavior of fellow students Alfred Dietz and Bernd Tischer. Torless watches with sinister fascination and admiration but does nothing to intervene or to help his classmates' hapless victims. When Tolrless finally does blow the whistle on his friends, it is he who is "invited" to leave the school. This is the formal solution: to delegate in others your own guilts: It's a real exorcism moral without scandal. You know: public virtue, hidden vices.

It's more than obvious the parallels in Young Torless to the Nazi years, then you aren't watching very carefully, and you will obtain an enormous satisfaction, due the smart dialogues, the horror sense and the atrocities who will degrade the human soul to unthinkable limits.

Think in a real jewel film filmed just nine years later, Reinhard Hauff's The brutalization of Franz Blum in which we will obeserve the slow process of adaptation in the hostile jail and you will be able to understand the inner demons of this generation of German filmmakers of the Post War, trying to cathartize themselves the sins and the sordidness of the previous generation.

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