Repressive times for Freud, teen
Franz Huchel is sure one lucky guy. The teenage farm boy barely has time to unpack after he arrives in Nazioccupied Vienna when he’s discovering the joy of sex with a cabaret dancer and getting love advice from his new best friend, Sigmund Freud.
With a premise like that, how is it “The Tobacconist” turned out so bland?
Nonetheless, Nikolaus Leytner’s competent, watchable but uninspired adaptation of the bestselling novel by Robert Seethaler does have a few attractions, chiefly a heartwarming farewell performance as Freud, the famed psychoanalyst, by the great Bruno Ganz, who died last year not long after filming.
Franz (Simon Morzé) is sent to Vienna by his mother (Regina Fritsch), who, believing he’ll have better opportunity in the capital city, secures an apprenticeship with a tobacconist — an old lover “before you fell into my lap,” she explains.
He is Otto, played by Johannes Krisch, a kindly idealist who lost a leg in World War I and sees the danger in an increasing Nazi presence. (Today you’d call him antifa.)
Otto provides more than tobacco at his shop; kids pick up school supplies, and there are postcards. On the countertop are several progressive daily newspapers — he won’t carry the socialist one — and under the counter, for special gentlemen customers, clandestine issues of Venus, the Playboy of 1930s Vienna.
As if all this wasn’t eyeopening enough for Franz, in walks regular customer Freud, who picks up boxes of cigars.
After Franz meets and is captivated by a Bohemian refugee, Anezka (Emma Drogunova), he is head over heels in love, and he turns to Freud for advice. One suggestion, which certainly sounds Freudian: Record your dreams in a notebook as soon as you wake up.
The other observation, which doesn’t sound much like the Freud we know: “Women are like cigars. If you pull at them too hard, they won’t give you any pleasure.”
Well, to be fair, Freud by that time had been out of the dating pool for a while; he married his wife, Martha, in 1886. Still, you might expect more from the the guy who postulated the existence of libido.
Anezka does come home with Franz one night, a moment of bliss in an otherwise volatile relationship; she turns out to be a sexually liberated woman and he can’t handle it.
Leytner tries to deepen the story with a few visual strategies to mixed results. Most notable are his dream sequences, which he dutifully records as Freud requested. But other than a passing reference, he never really discusses the dreams with Freud. Here’s a situation teed up for some Freudian analysis, but Leytner doesn’t go there.
The director too often presents scenes in which Franz does something he wishes he could do — usually something violent — but it turns out he is merely fantasizing.
The second half of the film shifts tone as the Nazi regime becomes more repressive. Otto is arrested; there’s pressure on Freud, who is Jewish, to escape to London. Franz’s priorities shift from Anezka to trying to free Otto, and to keep the tobacco shop running in his absence.
Freud notes to Franz at one point that “pleasure and pain are siblings.” But “The Tobacconist” has neither in extreme. In a movie that demands strong emotions, Leytner curiously pulls back, whether it’s a too artfully obscured sex scene when eroticism is called for or a political argument between neighbors. Even the Nazis’ brutal violence is depicted in abstract.
The production values of this film are excellent, however, and of course there is Ganz.
The SwissGerman actor was a coconspirator with director Wim Wenders opposite Dennis Hopper in “The American Friend” and as a sympathetic angel in “Wings of Desire.” He was also the definitive Hitler in “Downfall,” with a scene of explosive anger that served as the template for viral video parodies (the latest: “Hitler finds out Kanye West is running for president”).
The art house favorite was a gentle soul, and while his Freud might not have viral video potential, Ganz’s grace and effortless charm are very much on display one last time.