Young Törless

Volker Schlöndorff's first film is adapted from Robert Musil's 1906 novel The Confusions of Young Törless and set in an Austrian boarding school at the turn of the twentieth century. Törless is a clever, inward boy. He watches two classmates torture another one, becomes curious, studies it, and does not intervene. Not until the torture goes too far. The film's force lies not in the two boys committing the cruelty but in the one observing it. Törless treats the whole thing as an experiment, and that detached curiosity ends up more disturbing than the cruelty itself. Schlöndorff later acknowledged the parallels that could be drawn between the novel's characters and the German public's response to Nazism. The film never states that reading anywhere, but in Germany in 1966 it was hard to miss. It won the International Critics' Prize at Cannes in 1966 and counts among the founding works of New German Cinema. Who it is for: viewers curious about the renewal of German cinema in the sixties and about cold, analytical storytelling. Who it is not for: anyone disturbed by scenes of school violence and humiliation.