Diplomacy

The night of 24 August 1944, Paris. The German commander Dietrich von Choltitz holds an order to blow up the city and explosives are already under the bridges. The Swedish consul Raoul Nordling comes into the room. The film is almost entirely a conversation between these two men in a single room. The subject is not the war but which sentences can talk a man out of giving an order. Nordling does not open a moral argument; he talks about the commander's family, about being tried afterwards, about how he will enter history. The persuasion runs through calculation rather than feeling. The form is close to theatre: two actors, a table, a window. The camera goes outside only a handful of times. The source is Cyril Gely's play and both leads had performed the roles on the Paris stage, which makes the film less a first attempt than the record of a text long since cooked. The history is blurrier: Nordling and Choltitz did meet, but the conversation of that night is invention. André Dussollier and Niels Arestrup lead. Volker Schlöndorff directs. Who it is for: viewers who like two-hander tension and historical dialogue. Who it is not for: anyone waiting for movement; the film stays in one room throughout.