CHESS STORY / SCHACHNOVELLE (2021)

Best known to cineasts for THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL/14 (not seen here) and Max Ophül’s LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN/’48  (https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/04/letter-to-unknown-woman-1948.html), literary Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who successfully fled the Nazis only to suicide in Brazil when he was 60, has actually had more than 100 film & tv adaptations made from his work, including two of this story, a hallucinatory tale of international finance, madness, surviving the German/Austrian Anschluss of 1938, and chess.  (BTW - not Zweig’s only chess centered story to be filmed.)  Having mistimed the inevitable Nazi Occupation when German forces crossed into Austria ahead of a scheduled national referendum on annexation, lawyer Josef Bartok, who holds codes to the State’s foreign deposits, misses the ship to NYC his wife is taking when he's waylaid by police & soldiers on instruction from the new Nazi-controlled Treasury Department.  Locked into the luxury Hotel Metropole, but in a dire room fitted out in prison conditions, he’s psychologically tortured, physically abused and isolated; but promised his freedom if he gives up passwords to foreign held monies.  Slowly going mad, he’s almost drowned in a bathtub by an overeager jailer (his superior horrified at the thought of losing those codes) when an incident in the jail wing of the hotel allows Bartok to steal a book, the first companion he’s had in months.  By chance, it’s a book on great international champion chess matches and he’s soon obsessed by the game, eventually playing out some sort of fantasy match on a ocean ship against a great chess master and using all the tricks he’s picked up in his reading.  Zweig’s short story natural material for a heightened reality dramatization, but director  Philipp Stölzl, along with his entire production staff and cast (very much including lead Oliver Masucci - in a desperate situation, but his acting desperate in the wrong way) while maintaining a consistent tone, go so far overboard, everything comes out hopelessly overcooked.  Only the CGI ocean liner works as you want the whole film to, a triumph of design and execution while everything else is so neurotic & over-stylized right from the start, the film has nowhere to go other than ponderous excess as it forges ahead to an apparently hopeful ending in a mental asylum(?).  Pity.

WATCH THIS/NOT THAT/LINK:  Stölzl’s NORTH FACE/’08, also portraying this era, is far more successful capturing the discomforting political vibes of the time.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2015/05/nordwand-north-face-2008.html