Schlondorff: Diplomatie (Diplomacy) (2014)

The latest film from Volker Schlondorff is a tight, taut chamber drama set in Nazi Paris on the eve of the Allied victory. Shot mainly in real time and almost entirely within the confines of German Headquarters at the Hotel Meuriel, it’s a dramatisation of the relationship between General von Choltitz (Niels Arestrup), who was commissioned with destroying the city before the Allies arrived, and Swedish Consul Raoul Nordling (Andre Dussolier), whose supreme diplomatic skills prevented it from happening. Most of the film takes place as an extended negotiation between these two men, with interludes depicting the preparation for the destruction, which pretty much involved rigging every historic or significant site in Paris with explosives – Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Invalides, the Opera, the Parliament and the Place de la Concorde are just some of the targets – so as to flood the inner city until the foundations collapsed. That’s a pretty catastrophic prospect, and it’s a smart move on Schlondorff’s part to minimise our actual experience of Paris – it’s set mainly at night, although there’s still less of the city than there might be – so as to abstract and dissociate us from the familiar postcard pictures that are still available today, plunging us back into the gloom that settled over the city on what might have been its last night before it went the way of Mannheim, Hamburg and Berlin. At the same time, though, Schlondorff shoots everything within Choltitz’s room with a kind of heightened architectural awareness, from the secret passage and two-way mirror that Nordling uses to get in and incept Choltiz’s plan, to the long, lingering shots on details of décor, from doorknobs to dishes, as if to restrict his camera to the only spaces and fixtures that, for the Nazis, were totally above destruction, the heart of German Paris. Within those stifling tableaux, a purely diplomatic drama would already be highly atmospheric, but there’s a real art and grace to the way in which Choltitz and Nordling’s roles – the infinite obedience of the good general and the infinite flexibility of the good diplomat – allow little glimpses of character as well, as flexibility and obedience both start to lose their meaning under such extraordinary circumstances, until it’s as much of an interpersonal drama as a diplomatic one, especially once Cholitz discloses the recent announcement of the Sippenhaft, a Nazi dictum that makes him as much a captive of the situation as the Parisians. The result is a film that feels as if it might be made into a play, but that doesn’t feel adapted from a play – spoken almost entirely in a language that is not the characters’ or the director’s own, it is theatrical but never stagy, and that’s perhaps the best way to describe Nordling’s diplomacy as well, which Schlondorff waits for the last perfectly poised shot to capture in its quintessence.