NR | 1h 52min | Drama | Jan. 13, 2023
Chess terms like “checkmate” and “end game” lends themselves to military strategy. The game is also a pastime that sometimes blossoms into an obsession, but that is a feature rather than a problem for Dr. Josef Bartok (Oliver Masucci), at least while his National Socialist captors hold him in solitary confinement.
The test of wills becomes a metaphorical and perhaps literal chess match in Philipp Stolzl’s “Chess Story,” based on Stefan Zweig’s novella “The Royal Game.”
Bartok is a respected Austrian solicitor and notary, most notably for the former nobility, whose secret numbered accounts he manages. The anti-Nazi advocate is caught flat-footed by Germany’s sudden Anschluss annexation of his former nation, but he manages to sufficiently destroy his banking records before the German secret police take him into custody.
Ironically, Bartok is imprisoned in a luxury hotel, but Franz-Josef Bohm (Albrecht Schusch) and his Gestapo colleagues easily adapt it to their savage purposes. Instead of blunt torture, Bohm relies on isolation, sleep deprivation, malnutrition, boredom, and general discomfort to break Bartok’s spirit.
However, the advocate is keenly aware he will immediately outlive his usefulness to the Gestapo, once he divulges the account numbers and passwords entrusted to his safe keeping.
The Game
Does chess help Bartok survive? Initially, the flashforwards depicting his future as an immigrant, sailing across the Atlantic on an ocean-liner would suggest as much. Despite his happy reunion with his adoring wife Anna, there still seems to be something amiss with Bartok. In fact, we soon are given reason to suspect his perspective is not completely reliable.
Few writers understood the experience of involuntary exile as keenly as Zweig. He was one of the many Jewish European intellectuals who escaped National Socialist persecution thanks to the network established by American Varian Fry.
Yet, he committed suicide after reaching safety in Brazil, out of despair at the state of his Austrian homeland. In recent years, Zweig’s writing has experienced a renaissance of popularity, having inspired films like Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel” and “Stefan Zweig: Farewell to Europe.” “Chess Story” might be the best Zweig film yet, or at least the best since Max Ophuls’ “Letter from an Unknown Woman” released in 1948.
Stotzl’s approach works so well because, instead of inviting viewers to discern what is real and what is a figment of Bartok’s tormented mind, he convinces us the drama that unfolds is just as real and pressing for the advocate, either way. Arguably, the truly “real” becomes somewhat less real than the unreal refuges of his mind, at least for Bartok.
This is a great next-level-up performance from Masucci, who is stripped bare emotionally during the course of the film. In a few years, Masucci might make a great Santiago in Hemingway’s “Old Man and the Sea,” because his portrayal of Bartok definitely raises provocative questions regarding the distinction between “beaten” and “defeated.”
Despite an eerily symbolic dual role for Schuch, as Bartok’s chess rivals, both in prison and aboard the ocean-liner, the film entirely revolves around Bartok.
Even if you think you recognize where Eldar Grigorian’s adapted screenplay is headed, it evokes unexpected emotions when it gets there. Previously, Stotzl helmed the entertaining National Socialist-era mountaineering thriller “North Face,” the respectable German historical drama “Young Goethe in Love,” and the unpretentious English language espionage B-movie, “Erased,” but “Chess Story” is easily his most ambitious and accomplished film to date.
He and Grigorian capture the humanism and tragedy of Zweig’s work, while keeping the audience uncertain, but fully invested. “The Royal Game” is a tricky work to translate cinematically, but they pull it off with style. It is also quite unique among recent films, because it features a capitalist money-manager as the good guy.
Highly recommended, “Chess Story” begins its theatrical roll-out on Jan. 13 in New York.
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