Though primarily the story of one rural migrant young man's coming of age during the rise of Nazism in 1930s Vienna and Hitler's subsequent invasion of Austria, Franz (Simon Morze) and his traumatic transformation in The Tobacconist is somewhat, but should have been more substantially upstaged by a chance encounter and subsequent friendship with Sigmund Freud back then. Based on the adapted work of historical fiction by Austrian novelist Robert Seethaler, the details have yet to be sorted out as to what is factually true or poetic license of the author's imagination. But the subdued yet luminous portrayal of Freud by the late Bruno Ganz in one of his last films, should have been comparably afforded more attention as dramatic historical record.
Directed by Austrian filmmaker Nikolaus Leytner, the film begins with 19 year old Franz sent from the countryside by his financially struggling single mother after her lover dies, to help make ends meet by working as an apprentice for Vienna tobacco shop owner Otto - a former lover as well and a World War I veteran who has lost a leg in the war. Franz begins to pursue a friendship with the celebrated psychoanalyst Dr. Freud, who frequents the shop for his personal, ultimately deadly drug of choice, cigars. Meanwhile, Otto whose premises remain welcoming to Communists and Jews, is himself increasingly in danger of political persecution.
The relationship between the young man in search of the meaning of life during this increasingly chaotic and dangerous time, and the wise but intellectually elusive octogenarian, alternates with yet another elusive character - a flirtatious, mysterious Bohemian immigrant Anezka who sexually toys with the young man, while working nights as a scantily attired dancer at a cabaret initially mocking Hitler - then adulating him as the country falls under German occupation. Franz is desperate to learn from the older learned man about his irrepressible desire for this thankless woman, and the interpretation of his persistent related dreams bordering on nightmares - which are rendered visually in the movie with exquisitely crafted imagery.
On the other hand, Freud is more preoccupied with his own possible fate as a Jew, as those concerned about him urge his exile to London - which eventually transpires but is not depicted in the film. Nor disappointingly, is the arrest and interrogation by the Nazis of daughter Anna Freud, a distinguished historical figure in her own right, and the eventual murder of his three elderly sisters in the death camps. And as Freud appears to ponder and question the fate of his previously confident theories about human nature, under these horrifically unpredictable circumstances - yet another unfleshed out plot point seemingly crying out for dramatic development and context.
Freud would end his own life a year later in London, as an assisted suicide in the face of excruciating terminal cancer of the jaw. And though The Tobacconist deprives audiences psychologically (What would Freud say!) with its abbreviated options, moments as when the acclaimed psychoanalyst wearily succumbs to crashing on his own therapy couch out of historical exasperation - along with a final farewell to Bruno Ganz - are indelibly laced with a delicately conceived dark yet whimsical humor.
Prairie Miller
