Young Torless

Another film from the 1967 New York Film Festival was Volker Schlondorff's debut feature, Young Torless. Set in a boarding school in 1910, it can be seen as a parable on Nazism, and a precursor, as the boys depicted would have been the right age to be the officers in the German military.

Torless is sent off to school by his parents, but his father entrusts his safety to Beineberg, whom the father wishes Torless is more like. Torless is a poetic, sensitive type, who represents the kind of person who saw Nazism for what it was, but went along with it without feeling too much passion for it.

A boy named Basini, pressured to pay back money to Reiting, steals money from Beineberg and is quickly found out. Instead of turning him in, the three boys make him his slave, and humiliate and degrade him (there is also a veiled reference to sexual abuse). Basini becomes a kind of whipping boy--they don't really hate him, they just use him to exercise their sadism. Torless is conflicted about this. It's not that he has much sympathy for Basini, but his intellectual questions about it, such as whether good and evil exists on opposite sides of a lines, or whether there is no line at all.

The film is shot in a gloomy black and white which only increases the despair. We also see the boys torturing animals--one of the first shots is a boy toying with a fly with his pen, while a mouse is held above a flame and then flung to the ground.

There is also a poignant scene with Barbara Steele, queen of the Gothic horror films, as a prostitute who the boys frequent. She has a baby right in the room.

From all of the books and films about boarding schools, I'm glad I never went to one.