By Tom and Marilyn Jozwik
HE: A German-Austrian adaptation of novelist Robert Seethaler’s bestseller, “The Tobacconist” stars the late, great Swiss actor Bruno Ganz as Sigmund Freud and the very competent Simon Morze as adolescent smoke shop clerk Franz Huchel.
Against all odds, Franz becomes one of the legendary psychoanalyst’s closest friends. The cigar-smoking Freud dispenses advice concerning the young man’s tempestuous love life with Anezka (Emma Drugunova), a Bohemian dance hall girl, in the Milwaukee Film Festival entry.
If all this sounds like a winning comedy flick … it isn’t. The setting is Vienna in the early days of the Anschluss, the Nazi occupation. Freud is Jewish, but his international acclaim spares him much of the mistreatment experienced by fellow Viennese Jews like Otto Trsnyek (Johannes Krisch), employer of Franz, a Catholic, as owner of the tobacco store. Otto, who lost a leg in combat long ago, endures vandalism at the hands of Nazi-sympathizing neighbors and physical abuse at the hands of Nazi officials. Young Huchel protests in various ways, to little avail.
“The Tobacconist” is a winning film, decidedly—but not a winning comedy. Director Nikolaus Leytner (who co-wrote the screenplay) and cinematographer Hermann Dunzendorfer have deftly captured both late-1930s metropolitan Vienna and the Austrian countryside, while a talented cast has richly animated the personages of Seethaler’s book. On the negative side, mini-dream sequences, of which there are many, somewhat confused me and the story left me rather depressed (to be expected, I suppose, given the sad facts of history and man’s sometime propensity for inhumanity).
Grade: B+
SHE: The dark look to the film (I’m not sure the sun ever shone upon the characters), the 1930s Vienna setting and its mostly dour characters left room for precious little comedy in “The Tobacconist.” At first it looks like our young protagonist, Franz (Morze), will lighten the mood of the story when he meets and falls in love with a pretty Bohemian girl, Anezka, at a carnival in the small town. Even the carnival, however, looks bleak on a sunless day. Franz’s desire to grapple with love fills his head with strange dreams that prompt him to seek Freud’s advice.
The coming of age theme is nicely done and Morze and Drugunova are wonderful as the young couple wrestling with love and survival in their ever-changing world. As the love story ascends, it reaches its pinnacle when the two end up in bed in Franz’s little apartment behind the tobacco shop, and then race out into the snowy night without a stitch of clothing to make snow angels. It’s like that was the end of their youth.
Adding Freud to the story was an interesting choice (though I did enjoy Ganz’s take on the Father of Psychoanalysis), but I thought it unnecessary with an already strong story featuring Franz and Anezka, the shopkeeper, occasionally Franz’s mother and the horrors of Nazism looming throughout.
Grade: B