A Forgotten Man review – watchable account of central figure in Swiss wartime guilt – The Guardian
Switzerland’s unusual postwar burden of quasi-collaborator-guilt, with all its signs of evasion and denial, is the theme of this intimately offered black-and-white film from writer-director Laurent Nègre. It’s impressed by the real-life case of Hans Frölicher, the Swiss ambassador to Nazi Germany from 1938 to the top of the battle, a lot accredited of by the Nazi elite as a result of his submissive pro-German loyalty. It’s also a free adaptation of The Envoy, Thomas Hürlimann’s stage-play on the identical topic.
Michael Neuenschwander performs the ambassador, right here fictionalised as Heinrich Zwygart; he returns to Switzerland and his good-looking household property in 1945, a haggard and haunted determine with a drink drawback, but outwardly fiercely appropriate as befits a Swiss public determine and civil servant. Sensing that he is perhaps made the scapegoat for Switzerland’s embarrassment, he has a brand new plan to show his enduring patriotism by being as sycophantic to the People as he was to the Germans.
As for his fellow Swiss, Zwygart finds them blandly relieved that their picturesque cuckoo-clock paradise of neutrality is unscathed. Zwygart’s cantankerous old-soldier father (Peter Wyssbrod) nonetheless stoutly proclaims the fiction that Hitler was deterred from invading Switzerland after the autumn of France due to the swift mobilisation and steady battle-readiness of the Swiss military. Zwygart is not-so-secretly contemptuous of Switzerland’s “toy troopers” and has one other concept: Hitler stayed out of Switzerland as a result of Switzerland turned the Germans’ discreet banker, the concierge state which facilitated low cost or free of charge loans to help the Nazi battle effort, and was a helpful monetary good friend to the get together from properly earlier than the battle.
Zwygart was on the centre of this, and conspicuously declined to plead for a pardon within the case of Maurice Bavaud, a Swiss pupil who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1938 and was executed; additionally an actual case. However now Zwygart has hallucinatory visions of this would-be killer, the one Swiss who actually was on the proper facet of historical past. It is a watchable, if considerably stagey movie, and these jump-scare visions, leaping out of the ambassador’s tormented unconscious, may need labored higher within the theatre.
Adblock check (Why?)
