Der junge Törless

Young Toerless is some kind of whizz kid,ahead of his time.Played by the phenomenal Matthieu Carrière -who was only 16 at the time;I 'm looking for another actor ,able to play such an intellectual part,at such an early age!-He worries about imaginary(complex) numbers.For him,a square is positive,so the existence of such numbers (the square root of -1 can be i or -i)eludes him.He admits they are useful in geometry(rotations,similitaries)or trigonometry or even to build bridges,but he 's got to admit it without understanding the mathematical concept(You'll find out when you know ten times more in maths,the teacher says)During the movie,he will discover that a lot of things in life have to be admitted without a proof.

The film takes place in an old secondary school,in Austria,at the beginning of the 20th century,while Francis Joseph-whose photographs are pinned everywhere- was still the regnant emperor .This is the end of an era ,1914 is not far away. An iron discipline,students in uniform,the necessary and sufficient condition for the emergence of oppressors and their punching bag.

Two students choose one of their mates as a victim (to make up for their frustrated sexuality,because of a latent homosexuality?Ascene in which they're looking at erotic photographs is telling)And not the first to come!Someone different.Only difference can lead to inferiority. The poor lad stole some stuff,and now his mates can threaten him to reveal the whole thing to the teachers if...

So begin more and more sadistic scenes,culminating with the one at the gymnasium(A symbol : a punch bag is generally a sport outcast) where almost everyone inflicts moral and physical tortures on him.The former is the most humiliating:one of the cowards reads a letter from the unfortunate boy's mother,a widow sometimes unable to make ends meet-all the others are very rich kids-,making a fool of her.

And Toerless?He's primarily a spectator.Not exactly a peeping tom,but someone who uses the whole school,and its particularities,as an experiment behind closed doors.Evil exists as imaginary numbers do,we have to cope with it,even if we cannot understand its source.He will not intervene to help his neighbor,worse,he will shun the sound and the fury,which may infuriate many people who watch this movie.Actually,for Toerless, and for the teachers-who do not seem to be that much angry when they discover the horrible things that happen behind their walls,they are worthy forerunners of Nazis who thought the feeble ,the sick and the "different" one had to be eliminated-,the punch bag story is almost an abstract fact,which they intellectualize to a fault.

Matthieu Carrière has never made the career he deserved."Die jungeToerless" is not exactly an entertaining movie,but if you are looking for something different,this might be your cup of tea.

1. It's been said here that the gay content of the story has been removed. Well, the novel was released in 1905. We can nowadays interpret elements of the story in a gay context, but back then these notions did not exist. If Schlöndorff hints at homosexuality as an element of perversion, that is in fact faithful to the novel, which takes a strictly observatory, non-participating stance.

2. 'Törless' is often interpreted as an indicator of upcoming intolerance and Nazidom. Again, the novel was released at a much too early time to allow for such an interpretation; the novel's author Robert Musil certainly envisioned the inevitable fall of an empire stuck to tradition and incapable of accommodating personal liberties. Schlöndorff pushes some of the juvenile delinquents into similarities with the Nazis - albeit being carefully ambiguous about it -, but it would be wrong to consider this interpretation as a part of the original narrative.

3. 'Törless' is a highly psychological tale and film - again, Schlöndorff proves faithful to the novel in this respect. But this comes with the weakness of constructing characters around a certain social concept. It would be misleading to consider Törless and his rebellious friends as typical representatives of their era, or real figures upon which the author based his characters. As may be more obvious in Musil's masterpiece, 'The Man without Qualities', his characters are crafted to evoke rather a situation than a person; that makes his books almost impossible to adapt correctly.

Schlöndorff's film is somewhat middlebrow; it does not intend to be a substitute for reading the novel, but at the same time it carefully avoids to give the impression that it is anything but a rendition of it. That's not quite true; the interpretation is in the framing, the omissions of the subtext, and that the ideas upon watching the film differ considerably from those you get when you read the novel. One may call it therefore a failure - but an interesting failure to watch.

The movie won an award at the Cannes Film Festival when it was first released and signaled the beginning of a German cinematic revival. The book was written in 1906 and is a tedious read, although thankfully a short book. Homosexuality plays a large role in the book but virtually does not exist in the movie. Torless, a horny teenager in an all boys school, eventually has a torrid sexual affair with one of the students. The movie chooses to ignore this, and maybe for good reason as it was released in I believe in 1966. Filmed in black and white, the lack of color contributes to the atmosphere of German austerity that director uses to his advantage. The final speech by Torless is a brilliant defense for the lack of opposition by the middle class to the rise of Hitler. Most of the teenagers in the movie were not aspiring actors but were chosen almost at random for their roles. But considering the time in which it was produced this is a land mark film, especially for German cinema. The movie is much more entertaining than the book and the director,Volker Schlondorff, did a fabulous job and deserves the awards it was given.

By today's standards, a film like "Young Torless" may seem too coy and archly philosophical (and thus pretentious) a take on the corruption of youth, and the sources from which the corruption stems. Its strength, however, lies in the telling: when a student at a preparatory academy robs a peer to pay off a debt, he finds himself enslaved, both psychologically and sexually, by a gang of rogues looking to push him to the breaking point. In the midst of this is Torless (Matthieu Carriere), a student coming to terms with his identity in the midst of this moral dilemma, and whose mental landscape renders him a frustrated, conflicted character who runs the gamut from cold detachment to vague sympathy. While certain aspects of the film (the homosexual subplot, for instance) seem deliberately repressed due to the era, the implication is enough to give the events an additional potency. The black-and-white cinematography is excellent, capturing a specific atmosphere of dread and meditative solitude--German director Volker Schlondorff is not looking to titillate with sensationalist content, but instead spin a story of a young adult's struggle with the evils of an imperfect world. And on that level, "Young Torless" is one of the best films of its kind.

Young Törless is a pertinent reflection on good and evil and the way an individual behaves, given the lack of values in others.

In comparison with the moral and ethical values required by institutions, human behavior seems to follow an errant, amoral path, simply determined by chance, or the current of events. Especially when manifested in a group, human beings lose any values and act according to the tide. They practice excesses and suffer humiliations instinctively, as if they were a fatality of life.

The few who show the courage to remain faithful to fundamental values are marginalized, seen as outsiders, labeled as dreamers.

Being a German film from 1966, it is impossible not to relate this criticism to the rise and fall of Nazism, just 21 years earlier.

A film in which Volker Schlöndorff puts a finger on the wound of Nazism, still open in German society, and forces his compatriots to reflect on the mistakes of the past.