By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 2.5 cats
Director: Volker Schlöndorff
Starring: André Dussollier | Burghart Klaußner | Johannes Klaußner | Niels Arstrup | Robert Stadlober | Thomas Arnold
Original language title: Diplomatie
Country: france, germany
Year: 2014
Running time: 84
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3129564/combined
Thom says: “While director Schlöndorff doesn’t have quite the cachet of contemporaries Herzog, Fassbinder, or Wenders he still has a fairly consistent track record with THE TIN DRUM, YOUNG TORLESS, THE LOST HONOUR OF KATHARINA BLUM, COUP DE GRACE, CIRCLE OF DECEIT, SWANN IN LOVE, THE HANDMAID’S TALE, PALMETTO, & THE 9th DAY all being well-worth seeing. I also have a special fondness for him because of his version of THE TIN DRUM. When I was getting my bachelor’s degree in Film from San Francisco State University I became close friends with a great woman named Annie who for her project was making a scene from THE TIN DRUM & I appeared as a soldier in a desperate search for a runaway prisoner who has crawled under the skirts of a large peasant woman in a potato field. As an interesting sidelight Annie was having an affair with one of the Mitchell Brothers as they were opening their world famous pornographic live review and film palace. He was the brother who was murdered by the other brother after rising to the top. Which has nothing to do with DIPLOMACY.
“The gist of the film is that Dietrich von Choltitz, the German military governor of occupied France at the end of World War II is
given the order by the psychotic Fuehrer to decimate Paris. While von Choltitz has some reluctance to go through with the insane plan most of his military advisers are clomping at the bit to go on with it. He decides to confide in his friend, the Swedish consul-general Raoul Nordling, to get his take on the planned slaughter. While the tension of the night is supposed to build as an intellectual discussion goes on & on to decide the fate of one of the world’s greatest cities, and the acting between Dussollier & Arestrup is of the highest quality, in the end the total lack of suspense with the known outcome in plain site, the film’s professionalism was nearly wasted on the material. 2.56 cats”