Dream Work

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE TIN DRUM

Directed by Volker Schloendorff Screenplay by Jean-Claude Carriere, Volker Schloendorff, Franz Seitz, Guenter Grass

A woman is sitting by a fire in a bare field, roasting potatoes. In the distance two policemen are seen chasing a man who eludes them and asks the woman for help. She hides him under her voluminous skirts. While the police question her, the criminal impregnates her.

Children are playing. They are cooking soup. In the boiling pot, along with other disgusting items, they place two live frogs. They also urinate into it. Then they force another child to eat this concoction.

The decomposing head of a horse is pulled from the sea. Out of it tumbles a mass of eels. Later, the eeler, whose wife has been sickened by this spectacle, tries to force her to eat his catch. She retreats to the bedroom, where she is consoled sexually by her lover, who is also her husband's closest friend.

When Soviet armies enter Germany near the end of World War II, their troops find a group of civilians hiding in a basement. While the soldiers rape one of the women, a German swallows his Nazi Party emblem and dies grotesquely when its pin catches in his throat.

These are among the images one retains--probably for a very long time --from The Tin Drum. There are dozens of others, equally horrific, equally memorable. All are part of the life and times of little Oskar Matzerath, who, at the age of three, decides to grow no older physically, because he does not wish to participate in the obscenity of adult middle-class existence. Instead, armed with his little tin drum, which he beats to drown out the sounds of nonsense, and with a glass-shattering scream that is his ultimate weapon of protest, Oskar chooses to bear witness to the folly and evil deeds of adults.

Oskar is played with remarkable acuity by a twelve-year-old, David Bennent. It is significant that he opts for perpetual childhood before the Nazis come to power and take over Danzig, where most of this adaptation of Guenter Grass's monumental novel takes place. To Oskar, Nazism is but the logical extension of the world he has already rejected.

This film could have been merely a restatement of the familiar view that Nazism's rise can be traced to the poisoned soul of the German bourgoisie immediately after World War I. But that reckons without the artful response Director Schloendorff has made to Grass's epochal novel. He has resisted the temptation to make another showy display of the allegedly guilty German conscience. Behind Oskar, who is a boldly conceived and richly ambiguous symbolic figure, he has placed a marvelous cast. They are sharply realized, entirely realistic figures who exist in a palpable, well-specified environment. From the interplay of literary conceit and hard-edged, artfully compressed observations of a very real world, he has created a film that has the dislocating immediacy of a nightmare that anyone anywhere might conjure up. It is a bleak and unsparing vision. What lift there is to be derived from The Tin Drum is all aesthetic. Unlike most art that sets out to examine a so-called big subject, this is a quick-minded, even occasionally witty film that is, despite its size, paradoxically light on its feet. It deserves the Oscar it won last week as the year's best foreign film.

--Richard Schickel

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