The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.展开
8.0
杰西卡·查斯坦 伊萨克·埃尔南德斯 鲁伯特·弗兰德 马绍尔·贝尔 埃利希奥·梅兰德斯 梅赛德斯·埃尔南德斯 吉姆·安德森 Bobby August Jr. Lee Braithwaite 塞德里克·卡布雷拉 Phillip Caires 奈萨·多尔蒂 Nicholas Gould Scott Jordan Jayden Leavitt 塔蒂亚娜·朗德罗斯 大卫·席夫利 Rachel Thurow 特雷西·托德 Harris Warren