Notes from Confinement

"The Tin Drum (German: Die Blechtrommel) is a 1979 film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Günter Grass. It was directed and co-written by Volker Schlöndorff.

The film won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival and the 1979 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film."
That was from Wikipedia.

The film is narrated by Oskar, a boy who made himself stop growing at the age of three. He was born conscious, and had seen what happened while he was being ejected from his mother’s womb.

He decided to stay a child after seeing the “chaos” of his parents’ and their friends’ merry making, and their talk about politics, etc. He deliberately hurt himself by falling down the cellar stairs. His mother would perpetually blame this to his father claiming the later forgot to close the cellar trap door, until she died of eating too much raw fish.

For me the appeal of the movie did not come from the lead Oskar Matzerath (David Bennent) but from the strangeness of the characters around him: his grandparents, his mother who died of fish and has two lovers, his Nazi father who choked to death after swallowing his swastika pin while the Russians invade Poland, and a lot more. Oskar, with his unearthly devotion to his tin drum plus his glass-breaking voice, grew boring after a few minutes. But the things he saw and experienced to me were pretty "exotic." Enough to keep me glued for the entire length of the film. I'm afraid I'm implying that the movie is a little more like a peep show of freaks, and yes, I guess it was for me.

There were a lot of funny parts; there were a lot of horny parts too. And I treasured this film for its uncringy portrayal of young sexuality. Outside this, there was war rape and the like. But this very same young sexuality earned for the film a queue of controversies and angry mobs. In fact it made me think too--how will David Bennet recover after this experience of becoming Oskar? He's just a little boy...and he was made to perform very sensitive acts. So did he sacrifice his innocence for art's sake? Would it be better if they had hired a mature dwarf do the role instead? Or does this dilemma simply affirms that the idea of a "peter pan" is a complete impossibility?

In addition to the funny and horny parts, were the gross scenes...which I guess completed this film as an experience. In spite of this, I felt sick of the several sugar-and-saliva scenes between Oscar and their sixteen-year old maid, Maria, whom he believed he had impregnated. But I have to single out this mind blowing eel fishing scene, where Oskar's father helps this fisherman "fish out" fat eels out of a dead horse's head.

The film closed when Oskar decided to grow up, after he gave up his drum. After that, as a sort of "cycle" he fell one more time, this time not deliberate, in his father's grave after he was struck by a stone pitched by Kurt, his "suspected" son. Then Maria, Kurt and Oskar went to America, where according to the novel, of the same title, they would be encountering more rise and fall, and where Oskar will eventually end up in a mental institution. There.

I guess it was great. At least better than West Side Story...which I "tried" to watch afterward. I was speechless...