Saturday, January 5, 2013

The Inheritors (1998)

Director: Stefan Ruzowitzky                         Writer: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Film Score: John Leipold                              Cinematography: Henry Sharp
Starring: Simon Schwarz, Sophie Rois, Lars Rudolph, Elisabeth Orth

I haven’t seen a German film in a long time, Das Boot was probably the last one, unless you count The Reader. The Inheritors, or Die Siebtelbauern in German, is an incredibly powerful film, though it doesn’t seem that way going into it. The concept is pretty straightforward: a group of peasants inherit a farm from its owner in rural Germany in the Nineteenth Century with predictably comic results.

The farmer, it turns out, has been murdered by a woman that no one knows. She is held in the jail while the ten peasants who work the farm are informed that they have inherited the whole thing. While initially amusing to the other farmers they quickly become agitated when, instead of selling out, the peasants intend to make a go of it. At first they attempt to bankrupt them by taxation, but the group manages to get together the money by selling off the famer’s things. When that doesn’t work, they resort to violence and that’s when the film takes a turn to the dark side.

Simon Schwarz is wonderful as the ebullient foundling, now in his twenties and illiterate, who finds joy in everything. The narration is by Lars Rudolph, an educated boy who has been to the city and observes with a careful eye all that is going on. Sophie Rois is the strong-willed Emmy, who suffers not only the class prejudice of being a peasant but the sexism of being a woman, is the driving force in the film. Leading the farmers against the one-seventh-farmers (after three of them left) is Danninger, played by Ulrich Wildgruber, who gradually figures out that the foundling is actually the farmer’s son, the result of a rape of the woman who eventually killed him. It’s then that he turns all of the power of the village against the peasants with horrifying results. The ending is profoundly disturbing.

The Inheritors is really an indictment of all forms of prejudice that is wielded through power. Allegorically, the prejudice in the film can be seen as mirroring that in countries and societies all over the world. Any people who have been marginalized though economics and legal manipulation are essentially helpless against the controlling majority. In one scene where the farmers are complaining that the actions of the peasants are inspiring their own peasants to disobey, the translation on the subtitles calls the peasants “uppity,” a word choice that directly references the treatment of blacks in the United States. Director/writer Stefan Ruzowitzky did a wonderful job of adding humor to an incredibly dark side of human nature and in fine European fashion has made a masterful film that's worth seeking out.

No comments:

Post a Comment