Volker Schlöndorff was Melville's assistant in Le Doulos, but it's the opening of Les Enfants Terribles that he draws extensively on in his film debut, for the benefit of the New German Cinema. The kids aren't alright in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a stay at a military boarding school reveals the seeds of the Third Reich (and of Lord of the Flies) in a series of biting outlines. Young Törless (Mathieu Carrière) leaves mommy's carriage and meets new colleagues, though expectations of a conventional coming-of-age story disappear as soon as the slattern the boys visit turns out to be the great vampire-lady herself, Barbara Steele dispensing sepulchral lyricism as one of the teens fondles under her robe. The youngsters promptly change their choice of pleasure from sex to fascism: The oldest (Bernd Tischer) mouths slogans about superiority and violence, Basini (Marian Seidowsky) becomes the victim of their sadistic power games. Terror tactics include whippings, scalds, hypnotism, intimations of rape, psychological degradation; Basini displays numbed acceptance, when Törless tries to show compassion he ends up blaming the victim for not striking back. "Is there a gap in our reality," the protagonist ponders at the equation on the blackboard: Törless is congratulated by a teacher on a "strong strain of independent thought," but his complacent impotence to the torture right in front of him looks ahead to the kind of ideologies that empower madmen. The attic is a stage for beatings conducted and rationalized, the dorm holds surreptitious warnings and mock-trials, the gym becomes an arena for madness en masse -- the rooms are like models for If..., yet where Anderson uses educational oppressiveness to trigger the students' revolutionary impulses, Schlöndorff presents it as an incubator for the horrors ahead. "Develop our minds and prepare ourselves now," Beineberg declares. "We'll live later." With Fred Dietz. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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