http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/15/arts/diplomacy-directed-by-volker-schlondorff.html 2014-10-15 00:17:42 ‘Diplomacy,’ Directed by Volker Schlöndorff Volker Schlöndorff’s “Diplomacy” imagines an evening’s conversation that saved Paris from being blown up by a retreating Nazi army in 1944. === “We’ll always have Paris,” Rick promised Ilsa at the end of The man charged with carrying out the demolition was Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz, the German military governor of Paris. That he disobeyed the Führer’s orders is obvious enough, even to those who don’t know the historical details. How and why he did so is the subject of The story of Nordling’s contribution to saving Paris has been told on film before, in René Clément’s The conversations depicted here, in which Nordling uses all of his diplomatic skills to persuade von Choltitz to spare the city they both love, never took place, though the film’s timeline is otherwise accurate. It is, in any case, less a docudrama than an allegory, an attempt to distill the moral and psychological essence of a complex historical moment, and to illuminate that moment through the verbal interaction of two very different personalities. Von Choltitz, a veteran of both world wars from an old German military family, is blunt and brutal. He is also exhausted and demoralized, suffering from terrible asthma and the realization that the cause he has served is on the verge of defeat. Mr. Arestrup, a broad-chested, brooding bull of a man — so terrifying and charismatic as the The general is a puzzle for the ambassador to solve. Mr. Dussollier, a fixture in the intellectually nimble work of Mr. Schlöndorff, who served his apprenticeship in France with Louis Malle and Jean-Pierre Melville before becoming one of the leading figures in the New German Cinema of the 1970s, turns the talkiness and the staginess of “Diplomacy” to the film’s advantage. His precise, restless camera creates a feeling of claustrophobic suspense as the plot races against the clock toward what is, for the audience at least, a foregone conclusion. The real mystery lies not in the outcome but in von Choltitz’s motive. Has Nordling tapped into a hidden spring of decency, or does von Choltitz, like so many Germans (including Hitler) harbor a sentimental affection for Paris? Does the general care more about the safety of his wife and children in Germany or about the status of his nation in postwar Europe? You could say that the answers don’t matter, insofar as Nordling’s diplomacy was successful, and we still have Paris. But the value of “Diplomacy” is that it produces at least as much unsettlement as relief, compelling the viewer to remain haunted by nightmarish thoughts of what might have happened. Other cities were flattened, after all, and other populations were wiped out during World War II, which permanently collapsed the distance between the unthinkable and the actual. What seems unimaginable now was, a mere 70 years ago, not only imagined but also carefully planned and very nearly carried out.