Basini, a pathetic, slow witted and rather homely weakling, is targeted as a thief and is subjected to a series of humiliating, degrading experiments in the attic of a military academy. Basini willingly enslaves himself to his classmate Reiting, brilliantly portrayed as a popular bully "with gusto" (as one reviewer noted)by Fred Dietz, and seems to relish the abuse he has to endure.Basini is objectified- his debasement is seen from the point of view of Torless, who is fascinated by Basini's willingness to take whatever punishment is meted out, and his two chums - Reiting and the brainy sadist Beineberg. Eventually the sadists,who are running out of novel ways to torment their victim, decide to turn Basini over to the entire school, where he is strung up by the heels in the gym and subjected to an enthusiastic battering by his gleeful classmates. Basini is expelled as a moral degenerate, the "sensitive" Torless voluntarily leaves the academy. and the two arch-torturers stay on to graduate - no doubt with high honors. Musil's 1901 novel is more sexually explicit. In the novel Basini is stripped naked and battered by his classmates in preparation for a whipping. Basini turns himself in to avoid being flogged to death. In the novel Basini is described as pretty and sexually alluring. Seidowsky, the actor who portrays the victim in this movie, is pudgy and dull-eyed. His tormentors are handsome - almost charming at times, and that is likely closer to reality than we'd care to imagine. A modern remake could explore the homo-erotic sadism more explicitly than Schloendorf dared in the 1960s.
Plot summary
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. Adapted from Robert Musil's acclaimed novel, Young Törless launched the New German Cinema movement and garnered the 1966 Cannes Film Festival International Critics' Prize for first-time director Volker Schlöndorff.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
August 11, 2024 at 03:23 AM
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
720p.BLU 1080p.BLUMovie Reviews
Charismatic bullies confront a masochistic thief in Austrian military school
just to point out a few things...
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.
Kids these days...
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.