The War Zone
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The War Zone |
| Original title | The War Zone |
| Country of production | Great Britain |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1999 |
| length | 99 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Tim Roth |
| script | Alexander Stuart |
| production |
Dixie Linder , Sarah Radclyffe |
| music | Simon Boswell |
| camera | Seamus McGarvey |
| cut | Trevor Waite |
| occupation | |
| |
The War Zone is a British film drama from the year 1999 , that the sexual abuse treated a father to his daughter and the resulting family tragedy. The actor Tim Roth made his debut as a director, the screenplay was written by Alexander Stuart based on his own novel published in 1989.
action
A family of four recently moved from London to a remote house on the Devon cliffs . The parents, around their early 40s, have no names in the entire film and are only ever called father and mother . Daughter Jessie is 18 years old and her brother Tom is 15 years old. The mother is very pregnant. The father, who deals in antiques, keeps talking on the phone for business. The parents seem outwardly satisfied, but there is a noticeable distance between the individual members of the family, especially to Tom, about whom the father in particular is often annoyed. Only the two siblings are connected in a special way. The parents practice a free relationship to physicality, sometimes walk around the apartment unclothed and leave the doors open even in intimate moments. Jessie also doesn't seem to mind if her brother comes into the room while she is naked. The taciturn and closed Tom, who seems to be suffering a lot from moving away from the big city, secretly takes a liking to the slightly older Lucy from the neighborhood, which his sister does not miss.
When the mother's water bursts, the whole family drives to the hospital by car. The father loses control of the car and the car overturns. The newborn Alice is born at the scene of the accident, no one is seriously injured. Through a window, the shocked Tom, father and sister can see together in the bathtub. He confronts Jessie, but she asserts that "nothing" happened. During a family pub visit, Jessie meets Nick, a young man from the village, and the three of them drive to the beach with Tom. When Jessie and Tom come home in the morning, their father reacts aggressively, gets violent and accuses Nick of hurting his daughter. The mother stands protectively in front of her daughter and resolutely pushes the father out of the room, who apologizes to his daughter.
A short time later, Tom finds nude photos of his sister and a friend. Below is a picture of the father and daughter in a clearly sexual pose. Tom confronts his sister with this photo and again she tries to reassure him: She has Nick as a lover and doesn't need a relationship with her own father. Instead, Jessie claims that Tom is jealous because he wants to have sex himself and suggests asking Lucy if she would sleep with Tom. Tom withdraws speechless. During one of his lonely walks on the cliff, Tom sees Jessie disappearing into a bunker with Nick . When Tom sees his father and sister going into the bunker later on, Tom sneaks after them and films through a window how the crying Jessie is abused by the father. Then he throws the camera into the roaring surf. He tells his sister that he has seen everything, she is shocked and burns herself with a lighter and asks her brother to punish her in the same way. Tom joins in, but then stops abruptly and threatens to tell the sister everything to the mother.
The father takes the siblings on a business trip to London. There, Jessie leads Tom into the apartment of 30-year-old Carol, the friend Tom has already seen in the nude photos, and asks her to seduce Tom. When Carol and Tom undress and frantically exchange caresses, Jessie is suddenly in the room again, whereupon Tom immediately dresses ashamed.
In a night scene, Tom is suddenly woken up: little Alice is sick. The whole family goes to the clinic. During a visit the next day, Tom sees blood in the diaper of his little sister. He still can't tell his mother about his father's terrible actions, instead he advises her not to believe anything in the father and never to leave the baby alone. When the father calls the hospital that evening, the mother refuses to speak to him. Tom confronts his father about the scene in the bunker. The father insults and hits Tom and portrays him as a bold liar who wants to destroy the family. The children lock themselves in a room, which Tom soon leaves to get a knife in the kitchen. He goes to see his father, who now portrays Tom more calmly and fatherly as confused. When Jessie then directly accuses her father of abusing her, the latter also presents that as a lie, whereupon Tom stabs his father down. Tom flees to the bunker, Jessie follows him. She doesn't answer his question as to whether his father is dead. He also receives no answer to the question "What are we doing now?" The crying and shocked siblings sit next to each other in silence, Tom slowly gets up and closes the door of the bunker.
criticism
Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that the film was "brilliant and heartbreaking". It addresses incest and plays in the present, but is timeless. Roth - one of the best actors - turns out to be a director with surprising talents.
The editorial staff of Film-Dienst wrote that the film was an “oppressive family drama captured in intense images”. He cast "thanks to the sensitive staging as well as the acting performances [...] an emotionally and analytically convincing look at the explosive topic of sexual abuse in the family". In doing so, he “unreservedly takes the side of the victims, without demonizing the other side” and is a “deeply human film, shaped by its artistic responsibility towards the subject”.
Urs Jenny was impressed in the mirror by the two young amateur actors Lara Belmont ("a fine, fragile beauty with a pout") and Freddie Cunliffe ("a wonderfully sad, pimply boy who [...] from the depths of his loneliness so searching and looking around desiringly like only Tim Roth otherwise ”). Jenny also points out that the nude scenes do not appear erotic: "Nudity, as Tim Roth shows it, does not mean (as once with Bergman) beautiful bodies, but defenseless flesh and speaks more of pain than pleasure."
Daniel Sander particularly praised the director's performance in KulturSpiegel : “Sometimes it really hurts to watch it - Roth lets this tragedy approach its bitter finale so mercilessly. Roth brings his protagonists so painfully close to the audience as most other films would never dare, so disturbing, so brilliant. "
In the lexicon of international films , Rolf-Ruediger Hamacher wrote about the image guidance: “The chamber play-like tone is repeatedly canceled out by the wide perspective of the images, in which Roth artfully arranges the figures, turning the exterior and interior spaces into graphic tableaus. The muted colors adapt to the rough climate as well as the depressed mood of the people [...] "
Awards and nominations
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background
Executive producer Eric Abraham and producer Sarah Radclyffe had been considering making a film since the appearance of Alexander Stuart's novel. In 1996 they succeeded in getting Tim Roth interested in the project as a potential director. Roth himself negotiated the film rights with Stuart and won him over as a screenwriter. The director did not want teenagers with acting experience for the two young leading roles, but rather complete newbies. Freddie Cunliffe accompanied a friend to audition and was then hired himself. Lara Belmont was discovered and approached by a casting agent while shopping at Portobello Road Market .
Filming took place in Hartland (Devon) and London in the first few months of 1998 . The world premiere was on January 29, 1999 at the Sundance Film Festival . In February 1999 the film was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival, in May 1999 at the Cannes International Film Festival and on September 13, 1999 at the Toronto International Film Festival . Other film festivals followed. From December 1999 to April 2000, the film grossed approximately $ 237,000 in US cinemas .
The War Zone was broadcast several times on German-language television programs from 2001. In 2010 the film was released on the Kinowelt Home Entertainment label in German and English on DVD as No. 4 in the Arthaus Collection British Cinema series .
Web links
- The War Zone in theInternet Movie Database(English)
- The War Zone at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
- The War Zone at Metacritic (English)
- Review of the XENIX cinema in Zurich
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alexander Stuart: The War Zone. A novel. Hamilton, London 1989, ISBN 0-241-12342-9 . - German edition: The War Zone. Jessie's secret. Translated from the English by Sonja Winner. German first publication. Goldmann, Munich 1991, ISBN 3-442-09829-7 .
- ^ Roger Ebert: The War Zone , in: Chicago Sun-Times January 14, 2000, accessed February 11, 2008.
- ^ The War Zone in the Lexicon of International Films , accessed February 11, 2008
- ↑ a b c d Urs Jenny: What is beautiful must hurt , in: Der Spiegel 22/2000 from May 29, 2000, accessed December 1, 2010.
- ^ Daniel Sander: The War Zone , quoted from: The War Zone (DVD booklet), Kinowelt Home Entertainment, Leipzig 2010, p. 3.
- ^ Lexicon of International Films online , accessed December 27, 2010.
- ↑ Alex Todorov: About the film , in: The War Zone (DVD booklet), Kinowelt Home Entertainment, Leipzig 2010, p. 4.
- ↑ Alex Todorov: About the film , in: The War Zone (DVD booklet), Kinowelt Home Entertainment, Leipzig 2010, p. 5f.
- ↑ Internet Movie Database: Filming Locations for The War Zone , accessed February 11, 2008.
- ↑ Internet Movie Database: The War Zone premiere dates , accessed February 11, 2008.
- ^ Internet Movie Database: Box office results for The War Zone , accessed February 11, 2008.
- ↑ The War Zone ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in the film archive of the rtv media group, accessed December 6, 2010.
