The Childhood of a Leader, a 2015 film directed by Brady Corbet, is an inexplicable chronicle of inexplicable events. I have no idea what it is supposed to mean. Sartre wrote a novella called "The Childhood of a Leader" intended to expose the psychological forces that induce anti-Semitism and Fascism. There are no convincing correlations between Sartre's Bildungsroman, focusing intensely on the protagonist's latent homosexuality, and his admiration for various strong-man figures that he encounters in his adolescence. Corbett's picture shows us a few events that occur when the hero is about ten years old with a tiny, if grandiose, epilogue depicting the character's manhood. In the Corbett film, the youth has no friends, impulsively seeks a sexual encounter with a governess, and the story is devoid of any ideological content -- there is no trace of the anti-Jewish influences that motivate Sartre's 100 page novella. So, we must begin with an understanding that knowing about the Sartre story, which shares a title with Corbett's picture, does nothing to enhance one's understanding of the movie. The film, which is grim and rather dull, is, nonetheless, a work of art, carefully designed and beautifully lensed with an alarmingly sinister and bombastic musical score -- in some scenes, the score, sounding like a cross between Morricone and Shostakovich, rife with grotesque effects, actually seems to drive the action. (The soundtrack was composed by Scott Walker, a musician who began as a teen pop icon and, then, evolved into an avant-garde post-punk composer; he died in 2019 at the age of 78 -- someone characterized him as "Andy Williams turning into Stockhausen.) The picture has to be analyzed on its own terms. In cases, where there's no interpretative help from genre or precursor works (the film closest to The Childhood of a Leader is Carol Reed's The Fallen Idol), we must begin by looking carefully at the evidence at hand.
The Childhood of a Leader consists of an "Overture", three sections (:"Tantrums" 1 - 3), and a brief epilogue entitled "A New Era -- or Prescott the Bastard" -- I have no idea as to the identity of "Prescott", although I presume this is the name of the title character, now grown-up. The three "tantrum" sections are about the same length -- probably about 30 minutes each. The "Overture" begins with a self-referential "alienation effect": we hear an orchestra tuning up, then, someone says something about getting to work, and the percussive and impressive musical overture follows. A montage of documentary shots establishes that it is 1919, the Great War is over (we see some footage showing combat and starving children), and Woodrow Wilson has come to France to great acclaim to negotiate a lasting peace. Trains chug past ravaged battlegrounds and wrecked villages. Wilson looks smug and confident. Local peasants stand by the tracks holding signs that praise the American president. In the first "tantrum", we see a group of children descending a stairs, shot through a window -- one of the children is a cherubic youth with long blonde hair wearing angel wings. The camera comes inside the building that turns out to be a church and we see the children rehearsing in French a nativity pageant. Afterward, the cherubic youth goes outside, collects stones (we hear them clinking in his fist) and, then, begins throwing the rocks at the people emerging from the church. A man chases the boy who runs into a tree and is slightly injured. The boy will not explain why he pitched the stones at the congregational members leaving the church. At the boy's home, we are introduced to his mother, a stunning woman with black-hair and a stern demeanor (she turns out to be a German missionary's daughter). The boy's father is playing billiards with a handsome young man named Charles, apparently a journalist. The two men discuss how evil triumphs if good people aren't engaged to defeat bad forces in the world. There is a question as to whether vengeance or forgiveness should be applied to the defeated Germans. No one knows why the boy threw the stones and he refuses to answer questions about the incident. The next day, he is taken to the Catholic priest and asked to apologize. The lad refuses. That night, the boy has a strange dream, apparently prescient of an unusual pompous building shown in the film's epilogue -- the dream features a dome with rotunda and eerily moving old man-lift elevators. The boy wets the bed. On the following Sunday, the priest preaches a homily suggesting forgiveness and reconciliation should guide the negotiations for the treaty in Versailles. We know that the boy's father is the Assistant Secretary of State, an American advisor to Woodrow Wilson and that he is involved in the treaty negotiations in Paris, apparently close enough that he can drive there after spending weekends with his family. The father seems to favor a course of punishment in assessing reparations against the Germans. After the church service, the boy has to stand next to the Priest and, as people shake hands with him, he is supposed to apologize. Someone mistakes the boy for a girl and he is enraged -- but he does look like a beautiful young girl. During the service, the children have presented the Christmas pageant.
In "Tantrum 2," an attractive governess is engaged to teach the boy French. They read together a fable about a lion and a mouse. The moral of the fable is that "Little Friends may prove Great Friends." The governess is wearing a translucent white blouse through which the boy can see the woman's nipples. The woman looks as if she could be his mother's twin sister. Impulsively, the boy grabs at the governess' breast which offends her. Then, it's Ash Wednesday and mother and son walk in a spooky religious procession with people wearing long pointed black hoods. (On the soundtrack, we hear someone incongruously crooning "I'm always chasing rainbows.") The father plans for a secret meeting with his allies at the rural house -- they are conspiring against Wilson who has a more reconciliatory program for the peace. A test of wills ensues between mother and son -- he refuses to eat supper, despising the French cuisine (which a maid verifies to be disgusting). The boy is locked in his room for refusing to eat. But the maid, Mona, who has taken a maternal attachment to the boy (in lieu of his icy mother's affections) sneaks in food for him to eat. The mother discovers this and fires the maid, Mona, despite her pleas. Mona then vows to spend every waking hour "destroying your (the mother's) family." The boy also refuses to see the governess but tells her to "return in three days." The father's allies gather and vow to cut off coal to Germany. One of the father's associates congratulates him on "having a beautiful little daughter." This enrages our hero, the future leader, and he traipses about the house naked (presumably to reveal his actual sex). Dad beats the kid and, maybe, injures the boy's arm. He seems to have a seizure as he sprawls on the floor. Dad tries to persuade mom to have sex with him but she has a migraine and refuses -- obviously, standard operating procedure for this marriage. The boy again reads aloud the parable of the Lion and the Mouse, demonstrating his proficiency in French. Mom pays off the governess (Ada is her name) and gives her some advice: remain a teacher and never marry.
In "Tantrum 3", documentary footage shows us that the peace treaty has been signed. There's a big party at the rural mansion where the family lives. Charles, from the first "Tantrum", is at the party. Some critics see an implication that Charles is, or has been, the mother's lover and, further, the protagonist may, in fact, be his son. There's no doubt that something odd is going on between the boy's parents and the handsome Charles (he is a widower whose wife, also a journalist was killed at the Front), but nothing is ever dramatized or even implicitly presented to explain the situation. (In fact, Charles seems to have a girlfriend at the party.) The boy goes outside and picks up a bunch of stones (they click together in his fist). At the party, the boy demands to sit among the adults. When his mother asks him to lead the assembled diplomats in a prayer, he refuses and, then, shouts "I don't believe in praying any more." He repeats this with increasing agitation. When his mother confronts him, he bashes her on the forehead with a big stone and knocks her out (or she swoons). Dad chases our hero, catches him at the top of the stairs, where he seems to have a seizure. (The seizure is shot from a bizarre overhead camera angle that tilts the action of people running up the stairs to where the boy is lying so that they move upside-down.)
An epilogue follows. Some ministers are meeting in a weird official building with man-lifts, dark corridors and a rotunda above a third or fourth floor space. (We have seen this building and the circular rotunda before in the nightmare that the boy experienced that caused him to wet the bed -- this scary sequence, involving vistas on remote monuments and strange untenanted corridors with the manlifts continuously gliding up and down occurs in the first "Tantrum" scene.) Some nondescript officials in boxy Soviet-style suits mumble some urgent gibberish -- it's all spoken in euphemistic circumlocutions. The bureaucrats descend from the upper chamber under the rotunda and meet a huge, roaring crowd outside the elaborate structure. Cops and soldiers are wearing hats decorated with red asterisk-shaped insignia, apparently the sign of the regime. A procession of big sedans makes its way through the cheering mob. Inside one of the cars is a man with a moustache and shaved head, apparently the little boy now grown up (although there is nothing to really establish this). The man gets out of the car while people shout and the camera rolls over and over again, spinning between sky and the crowd while the musical score builds to a percussive climax. A small child cranes her neck in a strange way to look up into the heavens above the crowd.
The picture is handsomely made, although gloomy. The images have Rembrandt-style lighting, burnished and dark with amber glowing areas. Shots are often quite long and, sometimes, action is filmed from idiosyncratic angles. In several instances, the movie cuts from medium shots to extremely long shots, small figures lost in a big, sere landscape. There is no sunlight for the first 30 minutes of the 115 minute movie -- the first bright exterior occurs at that point, showing the leprous-looking, vast, and decaying mansion. Parts of the film are shot like a horror movie. The bland and angelic protagonist who is continually mistaken for a girl looks like other uncanny and demonic children in past movies, most notably like Damien in The Omen. The film's impressive symphonic score underlines the action and, in many cases, seems to precede the movie's images and drive their organization and editing.
I have almost no idea what this impressive, if somewhat dull, movie is supposed to mean. The first riddle is to decipher the relationship between the frame involving treaty and reparations negotiations with the defeated Germans. I suppose this may have something to do with deterring aggression and, of course, a theme in the picture is the boy's unmitigated and unmotivated aggressive conduct. It's unclear how the twice repeated parable of the mouse and the lion is meaningful, although the text is afforded pride of place in the movie. (Is this to suggest that the little boy is now a mouse but will grow up to be a lion? If so, it's hard to track the parallels between the story and the action in the film.) Clearly, the child is friendless with a cold mother and a remote indifferent father. The picture shows that the person he most loves and trusts in the world, Mona, is callously driven away from the household for caring for him -- but this is also ambiguous and its hard to know what to make of Mona's threat that she will spend the rest of her days ceaselessly trying to destroy the family. Some parts of the film are simply impossible to interpret or, even, really see clearly: why does the epilogue begin with images of gears and machines that seem to be imprinting some kind of seal on documents? Why are there no names used for major characters -- we don't find out that the boy is called "Prescott" until the last five minutes of the film. What are the ministers speaking about before the leader's arrival in the last section? Does the protagonist suffer, like Julius Caesar, from the "falling sickness" or some kind of epilepsy? Why is the film named after a celebrated novella by Sartre but, as far as I can see, completely different from that story and its themes? All of these things, and many others are riddles, but I'm not sure it's worth working out answers to these questions -- or, if answers, even exist. Most fundamentally, the story takes place in 1920 -- this means that the epilogue occurs around 1940 in what seems to be an middle European country? Where is this supposed to be? What is the country posited to be ruled by an American? These questions are probably too literal-minded. We first see the boy in a shadowy stairwell, descending with angel's wings on his shoulders. Is he a supernatural figure, some kind of demonic angel of destruction and apocalypse?
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