In the cinema: “Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull” by Detlev Buck – culture

One of the gags that no adaptation of “Felix Krull” leaves out is the father’s windy “sparkling wine production”, Engelbert Krull: Loreley extra cuvée. “The police should ban their champagne,” says Thomas Mann’s novel. “Eight days ago I let myself be tempted to drink half a bottle of it, and still today my nature has not recovered from this attack. (…) Is it petroleum or fusel that you add to the dosage?” In the original novel, the father responds to these accusations with equally ornate Thomas Mann sentences, which in the new film adaptation by Detlev Buck were summarized as follows: “The audience does not want good champagne, they just want champagne.” And that already bubbles in the opening credits of the new film.

Since Luchino Visconti’s film adaptation of “Death in Venice” (1974), which the film world unanimously classifies as a masterpiece, all Thomas Mann adaptations have had it, shall we say: difficult. Nevertheless, they haunt German cinemas with uncanny regularity, most recently as the fourth version of “Buddenbrooks” (2008), dressed up to the last frill. The main problem of many of these film adaptations is that the cylinders and flowing clothes, as if provided with a gold frame and brought onto the screen with the meticulousness of a school staging, are mostly just the core of the novels, the irony, the philosophical, theological and art-critical excursions to suggest.

These works always seemed a little, as if German film wanted to secure its own high cultural relevance with them, as if they were a kind of fig leaf for all the no-ear bunnies and goths that usually fill German cinemas. There have to be films for German lessons that the teacher doesn’t feel embarrassed about. Now it was the turn of “Felix Krull” again, it really has to be said, because some of these film adaptations are made with the regularity of decades, because otherwise the license rights of the film studios to the novels would expire. That was at least the reason for most of the Mann films to be made in the seventies and eighties, as Bernhard Sinkel, director of the “Krull” television series from 1982, once said. So it would fit in time that a “Krull” is coming up again. But that would also mean that a new “magic mountain” or a “death in Venice” may soon be imminent.

Detlev Buck wrote the script together with Daniel Kehlmann

“Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull” is Thomas Mann’s last novel. It was published in 1954, a year before Mann’s death, and is about the impostor of the same name who, with his good looks, suffocating friendliness and a lot of criminal energy, sneaks his way up into the highest social circles. A so-called picaresque novel, an artist’s satire, in which man dismantles his own craft, because of course the writer is always deceiving himself, helping himself from colleagues and simply selling things that have been jammed together with shiny labels. Writing as the Loreley extra cuvée among the arts. That is of course itself highly ironic, but as always with irony, there is a serious core behind the appearance and the improper.

In order not to miss this, director Detlev Buck, who recently drew attention to himself with countless film adaptations of the “Bibi Blocksberg” radio plays, brought the living writer on board as a screenwriter, who in the opinion of the filmmakers is probably closest to Thomas Mann coming up: Daniel Kehlmann.

The basic story is known. The young Felix Krull (Jannis Niewöhner) works, because the family broke up after the death of the champagne manufacturer’s father, as a lift boy in a Parisian luxury hotel, where he gains more and more advantages with charm and skill, until he finally even manages to identify one Accepts aristocrats and with their money and reputation sets off on a world tour, which is not told, however. Thomas Mann did not complete the novel, leaving it, as he himself said, “wide open”, which of course offers many possibilities for someone like Kehlmann. But he did not continue the novel, the film even adheres quite strictly to the sequence of the template from Krull’s youth and the time in the hotel until the end in Portugal. But Kehlmann emphasized an aspect that was already laid out in the novel, but well hidden, namely the dark side of Felix Krull, the melancholy of this existence between appearance and reality, between constant deception and passions that must be subordinated to it.

The famous pattern scene turns out to be funny – but it is also exaggerated into painfulness

That is a bit surprising, because the shimmering glossy pictures of Bucks promise otherwise. There is a lot of gossip and sex, more than is even hinted at in the template. Kehlmann has Krull’s intrigues to one éducation sentimentale Made for the young man and emphasizes everything that has to be sacrificed, for deceit and appearances. His Krull also carries a creepy skull doll with which he once played as a child, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Towards the end of Shakespeare’s drama, Hamlet finds the skull of Yorick, the court jester with whom he had so much fun as a child. “A fellow with an infinite sense of humor.” What’s left of the jokes? Just verses and novels, as a rich hotel guest whispers during sex in “Felix Krull”? This question accompanies Kehlmann’s young impostor as well as the artist.

So also in the famous pattern scene. Krull insists on being eager to serve, and then fakes an epileptic seizure, which leads the medical staff to retire him. With Kehlmann, Krull uses the same strategy in this very funny scene, but exaggerates it to the point of painfulness, with his Krull slobbering in front of the doctors fantasizing about how the enemy he wants to chase the bullets “into the flesh” “bleeds to death” and worse . The funny Krull as a psychopath. Kehlmann poured some bitter vermouth into the sparkling wine.

Open detailed view

Before the screening, the film does not fail to stage Krull’s preparation for this drama as an erotic role play with his tragic love Zaza (Liv Lisa Fries), whose role the film fortunately expands significantly. It all works because of Jannis Niewöhner, who, after a short period of getting used to it, plays Krull as the engaging character, from whom one takes away the charming manner as well as the tears. It goes well with how ironically sad Liv Lisa Fries can look as Zaza and how wonderfully naive David Kross as Marquis Louis de Venosta. In the end, in this three-way constellation, the whole drama threatens to collapse – and with Krull’s exploitative employment in a luxury hotel and the gap between the world of appearances and that of being, this threatening fall of the scenery can definitely be understood as a question of the system. Who is not an impostor?

But Buck and Kehlmann are not spoilers, and they know that the audience no longer just wants champagne, not even good ones. Detlev Bucks “Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull” is the gin and tonic among the Thomas Mann films.

Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull – D 2020. Director: Detlev Buck. Book: Daniel Kehlmann, Detlev Buck. Camera: Marc Achenbach. With: Jannis Niewöhner, Liv Lisa Fries, David Kross. Warner, 114 minutes.