ACCOLADES:
Best Drama Award -
LA Intenational Short Film Festival Best of Festival
Award -
Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films PRESENTED AT THE FOLLOWING FILMS FESTIVALS:
- Los Angeles International Short Film Festival - September 11,
2005
- Palm Springs International Festival of Short Films - September
26, 2005
- San Francisco World Film Festival - October 2005
- 13th Annual Hamptons International Film Festival - October 21,
2005
- 17th Annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival - February 11, 2007
FULL
SYNOPSIS:
On a typical morning the Treblinka extermination
camp, Commandant Stangl, is being served coffee and pastry by an
emaciated Jewish prisoner named Richard Blau, once a famous pastry
chef in Vienna before the war. Stangl has developed an unusual
fondness for this Jew and feels that in allowing Blau to cook for
him, he is demonstrating an extraordinary kindness. On this
particular morning Blau has painstakingly prepared his speciality:
Torte Bluma. But while serving Stangl, he ruins the pastry; and with
no more apricot jam left in Stangl's special stash, he cannot make a
fresh one. Surprisingly the Commandant decides to take pity on him,
sending him instead to search for more of the precious apricot
confection. The receiving station is the processing center for new
arrivals — Jews coming by cattle cars and destined for the gas
chambers. Beside the recently discarded suitcases, in bins filled
with confiscated bottles and jars, Blau miraculously finds some
apricot jam. However, when he opens the jar and tastes it, he looks
as if he's seen a ghost -- it's his father's very own jam from their
shop in Vienna. Blau finds his father in a long line of new
arrivals. They share a brief reunion that neither man had imagined
would ever be possible. But Blau knows that his father is soon to be
headed for the 'showers' and that he must plead to Stangl for one
great horrifying favor that demonstrates what the camps have done to
both Blau and Stangl.
REVIEWS:
Cinematical:
Directed by
Benjamin Ross (RKO 281), this film is only 18-minutes long, perhaps
because the very idea of its subject -- sonderkommandos -- is too
mind-blowing for a feature film to accommodate. The sonderkommandos,
of course, were Jewish slaves who were kept alive in the
concentration camps to perform such ungodly tasks as to convince the
new arrivals that nothing bad was afoot and to assist in processing
them through the 'showers' and then disposing of the remains
afterwards. "Torte Bluma", which is showing as an add-on short with
the print of "Two Or Three Things I Know About Him" at Manhattan's
Film Forum, stars Stellan Skarsgård
as Franz Stangl, an SS officer at Treblinka who repeats the phrase
"I walk this world but once" to himself repeatedly throughout the
piece, quietly pondering his own moral fiber as he debates over
issues like whether to grant his own sonderkommando, Blau (Simon
McBurney) the privilege of walking his father to an immediate death
after he arrives in the camp. This deep thought process is
interrupted only when Stangl gets a hankering for Torte Bluma, an
expensive jam.
Early in the piece, we see Blau serving Stangl a piece of cake that
turns out to be riddled with bugs. Stangl knocks it away and
screams, but stays his hand instead of pulling out his riding crop
and giving Blau the beating of his life. That's Stangl's conscience
kicking in, you see. He will do Blau the service of forgiving his
mistake and not deliver the beating that he clearly deserves -- he
will be the bigger man. This short film is, on some level, an
attempt to grasp the idea of a completely misguided or worthless
moral struggle -- a struggle that begins on such a misguided plateau
that it can't possibly result in anything but farce. In that
respect, it's reminiscent of another Holocaust piece, 2001's
"Conspiracy", with Kenneth Branagh as Reinhard Heydrich. That film
closes with Holocaust architect Heydrich relating a story to his
brethren Nazis meant to impart the lunatic lesson that they should
take care not to lose their humanity, in the midst of their
necessary business of carrying out the Holocaust.
"Unhappiness breeds inefficiency," Stangl tells another SS officer
at one point in "Torte Bluma", when that officer questions Stangl's
excessive kindness to Blau. The look in Stangl's eye when he says
this is almost like a wink at the audience, as if he sees himself as
some kind of Schindler-figure who is hustling his fellow Nazis in
other to sneak in a good deed. "This pretense of affection," the
other officer persists, "what good can it serve?" Stangl replies
with his catch-phrase, "I walk this world but once." Stangl is a man
who accepts his surroundings completely and has no higher plane with
which to contrast them against. He undoubtedly sees himself exactly
as he's presented -- a man who could teach these other officers a
thing or two about the value of kindness, tolerance, and turning the
other cheek. Skarsgard gives Stangl an appropriately stiff back --
he walks throughout the camp like the master of all he surveys, not
in the manner of a bully looking for someone to pick on, but as a
man actually keen to engage positively with the world.
The end of the film contains a facade -- a physical one, to match
the moral one. Thanks to Stangl's impressive kindness, Blau is
granted the privilege of taking his father out of the line, giving
him a last meal, and then walking him to the "hospital." During the
meal, he answers his father's questions with lies and encourages him
to finish his meal, before he will be unknowingly walked to a quick
and easy death. It's an incredible scene to watch, with better
acting than can be found in many feature-length films these days.
The "hospital" is a one-dimensional wooden frame designed to look
like a hospital from a distance, complete with a Red Cross symbol.
It's like a house on a movie set, with nothing behind the door
except a few support beams pushed into the mud to hold it up. What's
behind the door you can guess for yourself. The film ends where it
began, with Stangl unwinding after a long day of work and rewarding
himself, with a helping of his favorite jam -- Torte Bluma.
Iofilm.co.uk:
Every now and then a short film comes along with such a fantastic
story that you wish it was feature length. Torte Bluma is one
of those films. Putting a personal perspective on the horrors of war, this little
gem looks terrific. The cinematography is equal to that of far more
expensive undertakings and the look is matched by the content, the
details of which I won't go far into for fear of spoiling the great
number of surprises.
A middle-aged man is doing a spot of woodwork. He calls to his
butler for tea and everything smacks of the genteel
upper-middle-classes until he bites into a slice of cake and ants
scurry out.
What happens next turns the film on its head and makes for something
a very long way from Merchant Ivory. This fantastic drama is made
all the more powerful and chilling by the fact that it is based on a
true story. Want to see man's humanity - or lack of it - exposed?
You should. If you dare.
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