First things first. A Forgotten Man, despite its stage inspirations (Thomas Hürlimann’s Der Gesandte [The Envoy]), is a film made by a cinephile. The clue is the use of black-and-white, in most films now shot in monochrome, the art is often that of a below-average collagist. The awkward and unintended incongruity of the modern- the textures of digital shooting, the film school over-determination of flashy photography- mixing with the old, or what the old is imagined to be, a sort of hyperreal miasma of misremembered noir films. Yet director-writer Laurent Nègre and cinematographer Diego Dussuel wield black-and-white for a clear purpose built on a secure knowledge and understanding of their medium. Their images – and this is not a negative – are fussy, prim, unambiguous, clean, all polished buttons. Why? Because, we are made to understand, this is how Switzerland would prefer to see itself after the death of Hitler: frosted buns, glacial piano recitals and shining cutlery forever and ever.
We have a synchronicity of style and meaning or rather a style that drains some (false) meanings and creates others. Michael Neuenschwander, his face and manner brilliantly definitive of a haunted European bourgeois that cannot ever become entirely unmannered and unbureaucratic in its very being, is Heinrich Zwygart, a fictionalisation of Hans Frölicher, the Swiss ambassador to Germany between 1938 and the end of the war. Returning home after the fall of Berlin to a manor slowly being emptied of its most expensive furniture, he wrestles with what occurred during those seven years, particularly his lack of intervention in the execution of Swiss national Maurice Bavaud after a failed attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Unable to ascertain where his responsibility begins and ends – were the compromises Zwygart made with the Reich, his country becoming bankers of the regime, necessary to protect Switzerland’s interests and its only natural product (as Zwygart puts it, “other people’s money”) or a decision born of degrees of cowardice and complicity?
What may have been necessary was a certain de-dramatisation, a break from the conventions of the theatrical plot, to enter more thoroughly the linkages between ‘then’ and ‘now’
What could be more noble than to question those most complacent national myths that are often utilised as a convenient cover for present policy? We understand now that ‘neutrality’ is impossible: there is no such thing and this film offers succinct proof of that. The final moments are bitter and ironic, but certainly realistic: a scarred flag is flown as if pride were possible, as if Adolf really was scared by the drills of the Swiss army running up and down in borderland forests, but elsewhere things go on – corruption and compromise continue, indeed are marked as innate and essential to the world as systemised, structured and balanced. New powers fill the vacuum of old powers, redact the records and construct or touch up the myths that will allow for that continuation. Yesterday’s troubled man is denied the catharsis of the confessional, already too late in more ways than he realised.
We confront the ‘realities’ (industrial, state-bureaucratic i.e. capitalist and nationalist) that allowed for the extended madness of the first half of the twentieth century (the reality of mass slaughter as an absolutely necessary matter for the course, if not the motor of ‘development’ and ‘growth’) and the new forms that followed Hiroshima. It is a solid undermining of the naivety and charity of the usual centrist position: that traumas are an exception that can be smoothed over and forgiven; a reminder that the famous ‘humanist’ line of Jean Renoir’s- “everyone has their reasons”- is also an expression of terror and awareness of inhumanity. As those reasons are often facile, fraudulent, unthinking, determinedly destructive, not enough, never enough.
It is a shame, then, that much of the film lacks that same dialectical rigour. Its narrative is sometimes laborious, certainly overworked. Conversational scenes are too frequently structured like those of prestige television dramas – themselves often exercises in smoothing over trauma with platitudes and torturously portentous ‘psychological’ dialogue – and the visitations of the ghost of Bavaud an over-familiar expediency worthy of a more vulgar film.
What may have been necessary was a certain de-dramatisation, a break from the conventions of the theatrical plot, to enter more thoroughly the linkages between ‘then’ and ‘now’- in the mind and in exterior reality (i.e. the subjective and the objective). The retrospective gaze is useful in cinema when it, its properties and the meanings it generates are discovered between film-maker and audience and historical actuality in the processes of creation and projection; when we arrive with everything already determined, with a conclusion in-mind and not at the beginning of its formation, we risk falling back on a familiar diegesis utilised like a dulling shortcut.
A Forgotten Man (2022) plays in Selected UK Cinemas from 10th November
