Academy Awards, USA 1980
| Winner Oscar | Best Foreign Language Film
West Germany
|
United Artists
Directed by Volker Schlöndorff
My rating: 4 stars out of 4
(Blu-ray, Criterion Collection)
Three-year old Oskar decides to stop growing after watching the behavior of the adults around him. His mother is having an affair with a cousin while her husband apparently does not know or care. Oskar, his mother and two lovers take a vacation on a beach, where a fisherman retrieves eels out of a dead horse's head. She binges on fish and eels for a few days, reveals that she is pregnant, then apparently kills herself. His other father gets involved in a firefight with Nazis at a Polish post office, is wounded, then executed. His lone remaining parent hires a sixteen year old girl to help him, and Oskar promptly falls in love and seduces her. However, his father is also sleeping with her, and when she gets pregnant Oskar is convinced he is the father. Oskar decides to get away from it all by joining a circus of traveling dwarfs, where he becomes a star attraction due to his ability to shatter glass with his voice. However, the Nazis ruin that as well, forcing him back home to his father in their ruined city. The Russians find them hiding in the basement of their bombed out home, and his father chokes on his Nazi party pin. The orphaned Oskar decides to start growing again at his father's funeral, put passes along the ability to his son. Schlöndorff's adaptation of the Günter Grass novel is the high mark of the New German Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. Steeped deeply in symbolism, it is a stinging rebuke of Nazism and of the so-called adults who were complicit. A surreal fantasy, a grotesque nightmare, a coming of age story; it has many layers that demands multiple viewings to even begin to unravel. The soundtrack by Maurice Jarre is haunting, playful, unforgettable. A modern masterpiece of the cinema.
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