The 1976 movie that director Volker Schlöndorff and his then-wife, Margarethe von Trotta, who was the movie's scriptwriter as well as its star, made of lesbian Marguerite Yourcenar's 1939 novel Coup de Grace ("Der Fangschuß" in German) is less manifestly political than the one they made of Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, but seems considerably more political than Yourcenar's original novel. (Not least from the evidence of other Yourcenar novels, the relationship dynamics might as easily be set in an outpost of the declining Roman Empire or a frontier region of the declining T'ang Empire as on the blurred border of the attempted "White" counter-revolution to the Bolshevik Revolution). In adapting the novel, Margarethe von Trotta made the movie about the character she played, Sophie de Reval. None of Yourcenar's novels have a female protagonist, and the relationships between men and women are less important in them than their male protagonists' relationships with their beliefs, times, and other males.

Not only is it clear to me that Yourcenar's alter ego in Coup de Grace was the weary but determined officer leading a detachment of anti-Bolshevik soldiers in a Baltic state (probably Latvia), Erich von Lhomond, but this was clear to Schlöndorff and Von Trotta, as they relate in the lengthy (43-minute-long) DVD feature in which they speak about the making of the movie. Somewhat improbably, Erich (played by Matthias Habich), Sophie, and Sophie's brother Conrad (played by Rüdiger Kirschstein) were childhood friends before World War I began. Erich fought in the German army. It is unclear if Conrad did also, but at the start of the movie, Conrad is an officer under Erich's command. The White army unit is billeted in the Reval chateau, intermittently besieged by rifle and occasional mortar fire from Red guerillas. (There is no indication whether they are acting independently or under command from St. Pertersburg, just as who is commanding the Whites in the chateau is unclear.)

According to Schlöndorff, a movie set against the background of a war needs to be more explicit, more concrete about the war. The movie includes combat scenes (even if if does not make the command hierarchy on either side explicit). Yourcenar was more abstract about who was fighting and why, more interested in the interpersonal dynamics between Erich and the de Reval siblings. Sophie is in love with Erich, but Erich is devoted to war-making and protecting his men, including Conrad.

Feeling spurned (and looking, to me like a blonde reincarnation of Louise Brooks's "Lulu," though this is not one of the cinematic antecedents either Schlöndorff or Von Trotta mention), Sophia acts out, constituting a clear and present danger to self and others. She throws herself at one officer (played by Frederik von Zichy) and then another (Mathieu Carrière, grown up from being The Young Törless in Schlöndorff's first film), goes into the town, out riding in the combat zone, etc. It is not her brother who attempts to restrain her and protect the family honor, but Erich, who eventually slaps her during a Christmas party for behaving so sluttishly. Conrad is, indeed, less of a presence than the two fellow officers Sophie seduces to try to get Erich's attention and arouse his jealousy.

There is also typhus raging and the unit's physician (Marc Eyraud) bemoaning the lack of medical supplies. And a very demanding—or possibly demented—aunt (played by Valeska Gert who was a flapper singing and dancing star of the 1920s, and in Von Trotta's memory, was a "punk avant la lettre" while filming). And a communist tailor. And a whole lot of plot for a Yourcenar tale... which I don't want to give away.

The movie was shot in the same bleak far eastern Austria locale Schlöndorff used in "The Young Törless." It was filmed by Igor Luther (whom Schlöndorff recalled trying to get to work on one of his movies for a long time).The images are rarely beautiful, except for troops crossing a bridge near the end of the movie. The opening sequence of characters viewers do not yet know are Erich and Conrad dragging a horse are very vivid, and the Christmas party is filmed in the grand tradition of Max Ophuls's moving camera. The primary focus throughout the movie, however, is on Von Trotta's eyes (for which black-and-white was essential in Schlöndorff's estimation). Musical accents in a Bartok idiom were supplied by Stanley Myers (and his then-assistant, Hans Zimmer) and work very well.

Schlöndorff speaks of the final scene in the railroad station he used earlier in "Young Törless" as a single shot. Though I counted five cuts within the scene the occupies the last four minutes of the movie, it does flow as a single scene in which twelve people are executed. (I don't think this is giving away anything not already given away in the title of the book and movie!)

Although I'm not at all sure that what interested Yourcenar is amenable to adaptation to the screen, I regret the loss of that. What is added is well-done if fairly conventional combat scenes (and the title coup de grâce, which in the movie, as in the book, is open to differing interpretations of Sophie's motives and their long-range effects).

The Criterion edition provides immaculate sound and images, as one expects from them. The one extra is a major boon for those interested in how the novel was adapted and how the film was made. The quite probing analysis by Schlöndorff and Von Trotta is in French. The original novel was in French and the movie was dedicated to Jean-Pierre Melville, one of Schlöndorff's many French mentors (besides attending a Jesuit boarding school for high school, Schlöndorff was an assistant to Louis Malle in making "Zazie dans les Métro" and to Alain Resnais in making "Last Year at Marienbad") and both Schlöndorff and Von Trotta are fluent in French. But I know form extras on other Schlöndorff features that they are also both fluent in English (Schlöndorff has shot multiple movies in English, including the Dustin Hoffman version of the quintessential American play "Death of a Salesman"). It enhanced my appreciation of the movie, and explained their trepidations about making German anti-Bolsheviks, ca. 1919, seem too heroic. They are candid about wanting to make the movie about Sophie and that Yourcenar was beginning her long relationship with Grace Frick when she wrote the book (so that the title may be a pun) and unable to provide them any help when they were making the movie, because Grace Frick was then dying.

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This is my second entry in this year's gay/lesbian culture writeoff, a movie set in the same time period as the movie reviewed in my first entry, Anders als die Andern.

Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD