MOVIE REVIEW : ‘38: Vienna’ Recaptures Vanished Era

With the grace of a Strauss waltz “38: Vienna Before the Fall” (at the Monica 4-Plex) evokes a world heading for disaster. How deceptively beautiful that world is. It is the Vienna of the arts and culture, nurtured in the most elegant and venerable of settings. It is the Vienna of the coffeehouse, that inviting citadel of civility, and of the cabaret with its witty satirists, and of flourishing theaters.

At the heart of this bustling, stimulating world are the acclaimed young stage actress Carola Hell (Sunnyi Melles), a pale blonde as beautiful as she is talented, and her playwright lover Martin Hofmann (Tobias Engel), unhandsome but tall, thin and charming. At most any other time than late 1937 their future would be bright with promise. Their tragedy is that their enchantment with themselves, each other and their lives, blinds themselves to the reality that beneath the crumbling appearance of normality the times are darkening with gathering speed. When Martin exclaims happily that he has found a spacious apartment in the Webergasse “where Mozart passed three times a day,” a friend urges that he should be apartment-hunting in New York.

People who were in Vienna at the time of Hitler’s Anschluss on March 11, 1938, attest to the detailed authenticity of this handsome, heart-wrenching film, which veteran Austrian writer-director Wolfgang Gluck adapted from Friedrich Torberg’s posthumously published novel “This Too Was Vienna.” But Gluck and his stars’ signal achievement is in sustaining credibility and sympathy for these lovers who stubbornly behave like ostriches with their heads in the sand.

In Berlin for a theatrical engagement, Carola, who early on declares herself uninterested in politics, insults a pair of Nazi officers with smug self-satisfaction, oblivious of the certain consequences of her act. Both she and Martin, who is Jewish, receive ample and well-informed warning that Hitler’s annexation of Austria is imminent. Yet as the slurs and the discrimination aimed at Jews steadily mount, Martin reacts with loud, outraged pride. Like so many others, they allow themselves to be lulled by Hitler’s February, 1938, promise to Chancellor Kurt Schusschnigg that the Austrian people will be allowed to vote on whether to retain their independence or to become united with Germany.

There’s never a false move in this impassioned, flawlessly articulated and swiftly paced film (Times-rated Mature), a 1987 best foreign-film Oscar nominee, which brings to life a vanished era with a mixture of love and sorrow. Melles’ Carola and Engel’s Martin may be infuriating in their foolish pride and arrogance, yet they have a gallantry as seductive as Vienna itself.

‘38: VIENNA BEFORE THE FALL’

An East-West Classics release of an Austro-German co-production: Satel-Film (Vienna) GMBH/Almaro Film GMBH (Munich)/Bayerishcer Rundfunk. Producer Otto-Boris Dworak. Director Wolfgang Gluck. Screenplay Gluck; based on the novel “Auch das war Wien” (“This Too Was Vienna”). Camera Gerard Vandenberg. Music Bert Grund. Art director Herwig Libowitzky. Film editor Heidi Landorf. With Sunnyi Melles, Tobias Engel, Ingrid Burkhard, Heinz Trixner. In German, with English subtitles.

Running time: 1 hour, 37 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature.