The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.
玛丽安(莱娜·恩卓 Lena Endre 饰)和马库斯(Thomas Hanzon 饰)结婚多年,她对丈夫的激情早就被时光磨平,反倒是丈夫的朋友大卫(克里斯特·亨里克森 Krister Henriksson 饰)的身影渐渐吸引了玛丽安的注意。随着时间的推移,两人再也无法抑制内心里喷薄欲出的感情,走上了偷情的不归路。 最终,玛丽安选择了和马库斯离婚,但是两人的孽缘并没有就此终结,因为他们还有一个孩子需要抚养,与此同时,早已经反客为主的大卫不断的因为玛丽安和马库斯接触而醋意横生。让玛丽安万万没有想到的是,马库斯竟然选择了自杀,强烈的罪恶感将她推至了崩溃的边缘。
盖尔(雷·温斯顿 Ray Winstone 饰)曾是一名在“职场”上叱咤风云的大盗,如今,早已远离了江湖的他和妻子迪迪(阿曼达·莱德曼 Amanda Redman 饰)在一幢山间别墅内过着闲适惬意的生活,在好友艾奇(Cavan Kendall 饰)和杰克(Julianne White 饰)的陪伴下,盖尔觉得当初的金盆洗手是一个正确的决定。 一位不速之客的到来终结了盖尔的平静生活,他的名字叫唐(本·金斯利 Ben Kingsley 饰),是盖尔曾经的合作伙伴。唐行事暴躁,个性阴晴不定,他就犹如一颗定时炸弹,让盖尔提心吊胆。盖尔最不愿意见到的事情还是发生了,原来,唐的此次到来有着他的目的,那就是重新将盖尔拉上贼船,他要干一笔大买卖——抢劫英格兰银行。