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Old November 23rd, 2005 #1
Alex Linder
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Join Date: Nov 2003
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Default "Before the Fall"



Going 12 rounds with the Nazis

By Bob Strauss, Film Critic

There's certainly a tradition in European cinema - and in German films in particular - of presenting the boarding school as a kind of mini-fascist state.

"Before the Fall" does this literally. It's set during the winter of 1942-43 at one of Hitler's Napolas, short for National-Political Institutes of Learning. These were where well-connected or gifted youths were trained to become the Third Reich's future governors, bureaucrats and military leaders. As history had it, the ones not killed on the Russian Front tended to do pretty well for themselves in West Germany's postwar Economic Miracle.

"Before the Fall" is the tale of a disadvantaged young man, Friedrich Weimer (Max Riemelt), whose extraordinary boxing skills earn him an invitation to an elite Napola. His factory-worker father hates the Nazis, but Friedrich defies him and heads to class. The lad knows it's his ticket to a better future; and it is, after all, actually located in a castle on a hill.

For a while, Dennis Gansel's film treats us to standard-issue schoolboy high jinks. Friedrich's roommates prove a likable bunch, and they share flatulence jokes and peeps into the serving girls' quarters at night. Of course, upper classmen act like, well, Nazis, and there are those strange classes in Aryan racial superiority. Overall, though, not too bad for what is, essentially, military school.

But as the air grows colder and the situation in faraway Stalingrad heads south, Friedrich wonders if he should have listened to his father. He becomes close friends with the sensitive Albrecht (Tom Schilling), a poet with the misfortune of being a crude local Nazi official's son. Albrecht's dad, in fact, wishes his boy were more like Friedrich, on whom the entire school's hopes for a boxing trophy ride.

As in most European boarding school dramas - especially the German ones - it's implied that Albrecht prefers Friedrich to just about anybody else on Earth, too. Toss in no unmissed opportunity to strip the strapping young men down to their skivvies - and the general use of sexual humiliation as a teaching tool - and you'll understand why much of "Before the Fall's" meager promotional effort is targeted at the gay audience.

But the movie never really dares to speak about that subject. Doesn't need to, probably, since it's got the obvious but always effective, turns-out-Nazis-are-really-bad angle to work. There's also the tried-and-true boxing-ring metaphor for an individual's fight against society and his own inner conflicts.

Gansel and his screenwriting partner, Maggie Gansel, bring not a whiff of fresh nor penetrating insight to these subjects, although they do pull off the always tough trick of making Nazi-era Germans seem as human as the characters in the mediocre movies of other nations. That's some kind of victory, as far as it goes.

BEFORE THE FALL
Our rating:
(Not rated: violence, nudity, children in jeopardy, language)
Starring: Max Riemelt, Tom Schilling.
Director: Dennis Gansel.
Running time: 1 hr. 50 min.
Playing: Laemmle One Colorado, Pasadena; Laemmle Sunset 5, Hollywood; Edwards University Town Center 6, Irvine.
In a nutshell: Overwrought tale of a working-class boxer's sojourn in an elite Nazi prep school leads to kinda gay horsing around and the standard revelations about the evils of fascism. In German with English subtitles.

---
Bob Strauss, (818) 713-3670 [email protected]

http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/ente...ent/ci_3223880
 
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