The unknown soldier 2023 đánh giá

In this musical by Michael Friedman making its New York debut 30 months after his shocking death from AIDS at the age of 41, it would be impossible not to think of him from the very first song. In “The Great War,” a young girl named Ellen (Zoe Glick) sings conversationally about what she’s learned about World War I for a school report. Then suddenly the lyrics, still simple, turn profound:

I think sometimes you see a picture or hear a song or read a letter and a person that’s forgotten comes alive for a moment

The 16 songs in “Unknown Soldier” do make Michael Friedman come alive in all their eclectic glory. They are pointed or playful or full of passion, recalling the composer of works as different and distinct as the anarchic rock blaster “Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson,” the gentle, soulful “The Fortress of Solitude,” and the spontaneous scores that accompanied the many documentary musicals Friedman helped put together as a founding member of The Civilians theater troupe.

But there are also both a picture and a letter in “Unknown Soldier,” on which the plot hinges, and I find it much harder to argue that the show as a whole, co-written with Daniel Goldstein, comes as alive as the music. The show taps into so many common experiences – stumbling upon a family photograph; recalling a lost love; grappling with memories — but weaves them into a story too far-fetched and convoluted to wind up fully satisfying.

Young Ellen is in her grandmother’s house in Troy, New York in 1973 – which we soon discover is one of the three time periods in which the story unfolds. Young Ellen discovers an old newspaper clipping that shows a photograph of a beautiful young woman having a picnic with a soldier. She asks her grandmother Lucy (the unparalleled Estelle Parsons) whether she is the young woman in the photograph. Lucy, a cantankerous old lady, refuses to answer and walks away. Thirty years later, Lucy has died, and Ellen (Margo Seibert), now a 41-year-old unhappily married gynecologist, has returned to the house in Troy to clean out the place. She stumbles onto the photograph again. Via e-mail, she contacts the archives at Cornell University to help her solve the mystery of the photograph. An archivist named Andrew (Erik Lochtefeld) replies, and after some flirtatious email exchanges, gets personally involved as full on detective. (He too, we eventually learn, is also unhappily married.) What they piece together bit by bit occurs in 1918, when the young Lucy (Kerstin Anderson) meets a soldier in Grand Central Terminal, the day before he is going to be shipped overseas. They get married. Not longer afterward, she is informed that he has died overseas. Or has he? A soldier with amnesia is discovered wandering around in Grand Central Terminal, not even knowing his own name. The doctor decides to call him Frances Grand (the Grand because he was discovered in Grand Central. Francis (Perry Sherman, appropriately handsome and blank) is taken to a mental institution in Ithaca, New York. Lucy begins to visit him, thinking maybe he’s actually her husband. That’s the basic set-up, which took a while to get into focus (although nowhere near as much time or effort as the somewhat similar simultaneous multi-generational saga, Anatomy of a Suicide.) The confusion of the story is in sharp contrast to the crystalline cleverness and beauty of the songs. We first meet Francis when he sings the song “This Is A—,” which reflects this amnesia by having him unable to remember simple words, and failing to finish his sentences. When Andrew wants to get personal with Ellen, and asks her out for a milkshake, she sings the witty ditty “a milkshake is never a milkshake.” When Francis is written up in the newspaper, the chorus sings

It’s so so tragic And yet romantic He’s our favorite amnesiac shell-shocked celebrity

But the music is also at times genuinely romantic, as when Francis and Lucy sing a duet of operatic intensity under the Grand Central clock. In an inspired flourish by the design team, the clock has no hands, and doubles as the moon. This feels like part of the creative team’s effort to convince us that “Unknown Soldier” is a timeless meditation on memory and love and loss. And we do end up feeling that way, but mostly because we’re thinking of Michael Friedman.

“The Unknown Soldier,” a new documentary by Michael Verhoeven, takes on one of the comforting myths of postwar Germany: the idea that ordinary German soldiers were for the most part unaware of and uninvolved in the worst crimes of the Nazi regime.

In a version of history held by many Germans, the SS and other specialized organizations conceived and carried out policies of extermination against civilians, while the Wehrmacht rank and file went about the usual business of fighting the enemy. It was thus possible, after the war, to commemorate the service of fathers and grandfathers, and even to treat them with a measure of sentimental reverence, without condoning the atrocities of the Third Reich.

An exhibit that opened in Munich in 1997 explicitly challenged this view of history, and the controversy it provoked is the subject of Mr. Verhoeven’s film. Though his sympathies are clearly with the historians and curators who presented the German public with documentary and photographic evidence showing the extent of Wehrmacht participation in mass killings, Mr. Verhoeven allows all sides of the debate to be heard. Except, that is, for the far-right nationalist protesters whose leaders impose a gag rule, answering questions only with assertions that “the press lies.”

Listening to some Wehrmacht veterans defend themselves, he catches the familiar evasions of whitewashing and denial, as individuals trying to wriggle off the hook of culpability end up making excuses for Hitler as well. The reckoning with the past, which has occupied West German society since the 1960s, has been painful and divisive, which makes the calm, empirical spirit of this film all the more impressive.

Mr. Verhoeven has visited its themes before: in his 1990 film, “The Nasty Girl,” based on the true story of a young woman who challenged her hometown’s evasion of its wartime history. “The Unknown Soldier” is dense with detail and thick with painstaking interpretations, and it may be hard going for viewers not already familiar with the German intellectual scene. The film is a succession of talking-head interviews, and without some narration it is hard to understand the context of their arguments.

The content, however, is clear enough, and the evidence of Wehrmacht atrocities is both chilling and fascinating. The thoroughness with which “The Unknown Soldier” expunges the last traces of innocence from the citizens of the Third Reich may inspire some sympathy for those who came after. In this country, after all, we are accustomed to looking back admiringly on the achievements of the Greatest Generation. Germans, in contrast, must grapple with the legacy of their worst.

THE UNKNOWN SOLDIER

Opens today in Manhattan.

Produced and directed by Michael Verhoeven; in German, with English subtitles; edited by Gabriele Kröber; music by Martin Grubinger, Mike Herting and Art Percussion; released by First Run Features. At the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 97 minutes. This film is not rated.