The German Netflix production “Nothing New in the West” by Edward Berger has been nominated for an Oscar nine times, including in the top category “Best Film”. The 95th Academy Awards are scheduled to take place in Hollywood on March 12th.
For the brutal logic of war, for its cruel relentlessness, this film finds an impressive sequence of scenes right at the beginning. Director Edward Berger actually only traces the path of a uniform: from the killed soldier on the battlefield back behind the front line to the laundry. Cleaned of blood, the clothes are patched in the sewing workshop and sent home – where they are given to a new recruit who, of course, knows nothing about this cycle of death.
“Nothing New on the West” launched on Netflix on October 28, 2022
It is a strong prelude to the literary adaptation “Nothing New in the West” – although none of this is mentioned in the novel by Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970), which was first published in 1928 as a serial in the “Vossische Zeitung”. Berger, who was born in 1970, takes liberties with his adaptation of the material, which is in the Oscar race for Germany in 2023, condensing and shortening here, adding new characters and storylines there. That’s right and important so that the film works dramaturgically – only at the end does the script deviate too far and completely unnecessarily from the template.
As with Remarque, the focus of the production, which has been available on the Netflix streaming service since October 28, 2022, is the high school graduate Paul Bäumer. Infected by the hurray patriotism of the authorities, the young man and his cronies volunteered and fought on the western front in France in 1917.
“Nothing New in the West” is Germany’s entry for the Oscars
James Friend’s camera gets ruthlessly close to the soldiers, capturing fear of death, desperation and brutality in close-ups and rushing through the claustrophobic confines of the trenches. The director contrasts these battle paintings in grey-green dirt with impressive shots of untouched nature and scenes of enormous aesthetic radiance, which only unfold their perversion when it becomes clear that this optical festival is triggered by flares illuminating the battlefield.
Berger has found a convincing cast, especially for the supporting roles: Above all, the famous Albrecht Schuch, who gives the long-serving front-line soldier Stanislaus Katczinsky an impressive depth. In a second, newly invented plot line, the Center politician Matthias Erzberger, whom Daniel Brühl draws as a wagging humanist, strives for a truce with the French. With this and with the general played by Devid Striesow with quiet fanaticism, Berger addresses peace efforts and the emerging “stab in the back legend”. Unfortunately, Felix Kammerer, of all people, drops out as Paul in the ensemble. He understandably shows that the recruit is overwhelmed. But then he hardly succeeds in developing his character; when Paul, jaded, marches towards the last stand, this resignation remains assertive. Schuch, on the other hand, manages seemingly effortlessly to bare another facet of his Katczinsky from scene to scene. “We walk around like travelers in a landscape from the past,” he once said – and by “former” means: in a landscape without people. peaceful.
(More cinema? Read our film review of “Mother” with Anke Engelke here.)
