Review on 📀 Young Törless DVD by Jeff Rhodes

This film from the mid-1960s was one of the first German films to tackle the sensitive issue of why the Germans so widely tolerated the brutality of the Nazi regime. The film is based on Robert Musil's 1906 novel about a young man at an Austrian military academy before the First World War. The novel was extraordinarily prescient in diagnosing some of the deep and ultimately tragic flaws in Austrian and German society. The film follows the novel quite closely. The story is simple: two cadets orchestrate a gradually escalating campaign of humiliation and torture against another boy (Bassini, played by a Jewish actor btw) while Törless looks on in a repulsive yet level manner. Charmed. The violence is real, but not particularly visible (at least by modern standards). The real issue is Törless' inability to understand torture on anything other than an abstract, intellectual level - like mathematical imaginary numbers, which is one of the few strong metaphors in the film. This story became much more powerful after World War II. Volker Schlöndorff's black and white widescreen shots are unusually dark; The academy is on an almost nondescript level. Criterion recovery is excellent; Even the original score has been restored. I admit that not everyone will react to this film. But those who do will most likely not be able to forget it.