Uprising: the Legend of Michael Kolhaas is a French film directed in 2013-14 by Arnaud des Pallieres. The movie, although handsomely produced with famous actors, is a mess, ineptly executed, an example of directorial malpractice. Sometimes, the ways in which an ambitious movie fails are more interesting than a success. So the picture repays some close attention.
First, Kolhaas is based upon an intractable novella by Heinrich von Kleist that is best appreciated in the abstract as a schematic study of justice and its limits. Viewed up close, the novella deteriorates into a welter of characters who strut and fret their brief moment in Kleist's feverish prose and, then, are forgotten, their roles too opaque to be really understood. Although the outline of the story is appealing -- a simple man who is misused by authorities seeks revenge -- the narrative's details are bizarre and fantastically intricate, involving elaborate political machinations by various late medieval rulers; the princes of Brandenburg and Saxony are entangled in the tale and Kolhaas' revolt has theological implications: Martin Luther makes a cameo appearance; Kolhaas' uprising has superficial similarities to the peasant revolts inadvertently fomented by the Protestant Reformation and Luther is quick to protest civil unrest in the name of his doctrine. The King of Poland gets involved somehow and, most of the story, involves political machinations that are very hard to follow. Finally, the novella ends with an elaborate Gothic climax involving a gypsy's prophecies, a disputed line of succession and Kolhaas literally eating papers documenting the prophecy, a defiant act committed at the moment of his execution that sends the villainous prince into a nervous breakdown. An exponent of Romanticism, von Kleist's ruthless and crazed prose is more akin to Edgar Alan Poe than Stendhal, for instance, and the novella is full of Sturm und Drang of the most exaggerated kind, all of this embedded in a complicated historical context involving much Machiavellian scheming. The novella has a broad arc that seems superficially engaging and readily adapted -- what happens when a man relentlessly seeks justice? -- but the story's intricacies have defeated all film adaptations. Indeed, Arnaud des Pallieres uses only the vaguest outlines of the tale and doesn't attempt to depict the befuddling political context, let alone the weird (politically incorrect) Gothic aspects of the story involving the gypsy and her prophecy and Kolhaas' final meal chowing down on the memoranda that explains the disputed line of succession among the Saxon nobility. The movie's departure from Kleist's half-mad and reckless text is probably all for the good. One German critic has noticed that the last ten pages of the novella involve no less than 16 implausible coincidences.
Here's the outline of the story that the film Uprising presents: A virtuous if somewhat dour and laconic horse trader leads a brace of beautiful animals over a rugged mountain pass. This is Kolhaas, played by Mads Mikkelsen, a man whose face resembles an Asiatic version of the young Clint Eastwood carved out of olive wood -- he's both beautiful and inexpressive. Kolhaas encounters a toll-gate. He protests the toll and ends up leaving his two black stallions with the tollkeeper, the minion of a sinister Baron, while he passes through to sell his other horses to raise funds to pay for passage. Kolhaas' servant Cesar is left to manage the horses. Cesar does a poor job and finds the animals have been brutally mistreated and are damaged. When he remonstrates with the Baron's thugs, they set vicious hounds on him and he is badly mauled. Kolhaas comes back to find his horses ruined and his servant maimed. He has verified that the Baron has no right to charge tolls to pass through his territory. The hero refuses to accept the mutilated horses and demands that the Baron restore them to good health and pay damages to boot. Kolhaas hires a lawyer who litigates the horse trader's claims to no avail. Then, Kolhaas wife goes to the Princess (a rather shadowy figure) to appeal the claim. Somehow, she gets beaten half-to-death and ends up dying back at Kolhaas' ranch. So far this narrative tracks, Kleist's story closely. Kolhaas raises a small posse of local ruffians and they attack the Baron's castle, killing the servants who mistreated the horses, Cesar, and the hero's wife (The baron flees in a nun's habit.). Kolhaas then besieges a convent in a scene that makes no sense at all. He apparently burns the convent although nothing is clear about this aspect of the movie -- the comely woman that we see prostrating herself in the convent whom we assume to be the princess has nothing to do with the story; she's just some nun who happens to praying when Kolhaas' band attacks the place with a fiery arrows. A clergyman comes to the outlaw camp and asks Kolhaas to cease and desist from his rampage. But Kolhaas is intransigent and, apparently, continues his vendetta. Then, things go completely off the narrative track. Kolhaas who has refused at all cost to stand down from his vengeance decides for some reason to trust the princess. He surrenders to her and, with his angelic small daughter, ends up in a dungeon. There's more wrangling and Kolhaas is dragged out into a meadow somewhere to be executed -- seemingly, the meadow execution scene has to do with the production running out of money; a mountain meadow is cheaper than a full-blown set representing a medieval town square. Bruno Ganz shows up in a thankless role as some sort of mediator. He leads the villainous Baron, who is also fettered into the meadow, and says that the Baron has been in jail for two years, had to restore the horses to health, and has paid damages for mangling Cesar who has been dead, now, for a couple years. (It's not explained how any of this happened.) Kolhaas accepts the money and horses, giving them to his daughter, and, then, has his head chopped-off. The last hour makes no sense at all.
The film has none of the world-historical scope of Kleist's story -- the real Kolhaas (and Kleist's hero) burns down the whole city of Wittenberg and, then, negotiates with princes and kings to persuade them to join his feud. The movie's Kolhaas tramps around in the Languedoc mountains and sets afire the sheds around one convent. A few people get murdered but this is done discretely off-screen -- the skirmishes are shot in such low lighting (Kolhaas always attacks at dawn) that we can't see what is going on. The editing in simply atrocious -- eye-lines don't match and most scenes involving dialogue are shot in a peculiar way that suggests that the actors performing in the colloquy are on separate continents. There are no master shots and so no one seems to occupy the same space with anyone else. Kolhaas seems to be some kind of idiot -- he is so impassive as to be inert. There's a typical Cable TV sex scene with Kolhaas' wife that ends with the angelic daughter interrupting them and saying inscrutably: "You told me to interrupt you if I heard you making love." What is this supposed to mean? And why would anyone tell this to a child? A couple of examples will suffice to show the movie's inept construction and incommunicative editing. In a skirmish scene, the screen goes black. We see a sliver of light shining through a closed door. The door opens. Kolhaas enters. He goes into a shadowy corner and rummages around in some kind of bin. Then, the scene ends. Why was it shot in this way? Where is the door? What is the building that the hero enters? Why is he rummaging in a bin? In another scene, the Princess finally appears and she is homely, dressed in funereal black, and moves like a serpent. She twists and turns around the motionless Kolhaas, performing a sinuous pas de deux with him. (No two people engaged in a serious discussion have ever interacted in this way from the very beginning of the world). Why is she writhing in circles around her motionless interlocutor?) Then, the princess suddenly kneels? Why? A inserted shot shows two graves -- apparently, the tombs of Cesar and Kolhaas' wife. Where are the tombs in relationship to the kneeling woman? Here, of course, a master shot should show us where the tombs are located, where Kolhaas is standing and where the princess is kneeling. But we get no such shot. Instead, the camera portentously pans to the left of the two tombs to show....what? a patch of grass. It's a totally pointless camera movement, doesn't represent anyone's point of view, and just seems like some sort of mistake. This is on par with the inept staging of landscapes and weather. People move around in fog for a couple shots and, then, are shown in the bright sunny daylight. Suddenly, it's night or dawn, always the "magic hour" in which can see very little at all. It starts to rain, but in the next shot it's clear. Horsemen are riding through a dappled forest. In the next shot, they are on a high mountain terrace with black clouds dragging shadows over the landscape. It's all a muddle. Many of the shots are beautiful individually, but without coherent editing, the film is just a confusing slide show.
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