Paying Dues

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

MEPHISTO

Directed by Istvan Szabo Screenplay by Istvan Szabo and Peter Dobai

The subject could not be more serious: an actor's gradual betrayal of political, not to mention moral, principle in return for professional advancement in Nazi Germany. The style could not be more surprising. One has come to expect material of this kind to be set forth in a tone of grim and stately foreboding. Instead, Mephisto, a Hungarian-German coproduction that richly deserved its Oscar as this year's Best Foreign Film, moves with a feverish back-staginess, a rushing, unbalancing energy that not only freshens one's historical imagination but finally forces the viewer to turn in on himself, trying to determine whether, in similarly tempting circumstances, he would have done better than its protagonist, Hendrik Hoefgen.

Hendrik is a minor actor correctly convinced that he is harboring a major talent--and desperate to the edge of hysteria to escape the provincial stages of his early years. He is discovered in his dressing room throwing a tantrum, while outside, in the theater, someone else is happily drowning in the applause he pathetically needs and will do anything to get. Do the Communists, with their workers' theaters and cabarets, offer him showcases? Very well, he will be a Communist. Does a rather distant and chilly woman offer him social advancement and a way into Berlin's better artistic circles? Fine, he will marry her and quietly send for his mistress once he has settled into his new career in the capital. Do the Nazis flatter him, indulge him and eventually offer him the directorship of a great state theater? All right, he will reshape his famous performance as Mephistopheles in Faust to suit their totalitarian purposes. They represent, as far as he can see, no more than the next step in his irresistible rise. At first, they even let him intercede on behalf of old friends who have fallen into their disfavor.

Hendrik is not inherently evil. Indeed, in Klaus Maria Brandauer's person, he presents a rather open and innocent face to the world, and one comes to see that he is the victim not so much of calculation as of a failure to calculate. He appeals before he appalls. He really cannot see, until the end of the story, the difference between the Nazis and everyone else with whom he has leagued himself to get ahead, cannot imagine the dire consequences of ambition unmediated by, among other factors, simple common sense.

Poor Hendrik (yes, a terrible sympathy for him does creep in). He cannot even distinguish between acting on a stage and making appearances for the party at public functions. Both are, after all, performances, to be relished for the gratifying attention that is focused on him. Many actors have had fun and won admiration by playing bad actors. Few have dared what Brandauer accomplishes: showing us a good actor responding to the same neurotic drive for the center of the stage, the immortalizing role. His is a great performance, nothing less.

The film is adapted from a novel by Klaus Mann, Thomas' son, which he wrote in exile and which, of course, could not be published in Nazi Germany. Even after the war, publication was prevented by the heirs of Gustaf Gruendgens, the actor on whom the character of Hendrik was allegedly based. Mann committed suicide at least partly because of the continued failure to have this work published in his native land. It is a salutary irony that thanks to Brandauer, who is Austrian, and Director Szabo, who is Hungarian, his great character now appears before a world audience with that special vividness a distinguished film can impart.

The movie is beautifully cast, with an especially delicate portrayal of absolute sadism by Rolf Hoppe, as Hendrik's Nazi protector. Szabo's style is deliberately arrhythmic. There are formality and expansiveness in some sequences, shock cuts and nervous tension in others, emphasizing the contrast between the actor's bland public face and the awful anxiety that keeps growing and growing just beneath its surface. The result is a film that, through the sheer force of its imagery and its central performance, is that rarest of artistic efforts, a moral act that is never overtly moralizing, and always supremely artful.

-- By Richard Schickel

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