Colonel Redl

The story of an officer rising through the Austro-Hungarian army. Redl was born into a poor family at the eastern edge of the empire. He enters military school and learns one thing there: belonging requires erasing parts of yourself. He conceals his origins, corrects his accent, and displays loyalty to the emperor at every opportunity. He rises and comes to head the intelligence service. But what he hides rises with him, and at a certain point his superiors learn of it. That is where the film's real subject begins: how an institution uses a person's weak point. The narrative moves less like a spy film than a story of identity. The character starts from a real person but the film moves away from him and takes John Osborne's play as its direct source. Klaus Maria Brandauer plays Redl; it is the second film of the trilogy he made with the director. István Szabó directed. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes and was nominated for the foreign film Oscar for Hungary. A strong example for anyone who likes Central European history and stories of institutional power. For a viewer expecting action, the film is long and proceeds almost entirely in rooms, through conversation.