The foot soldiers are dumped in a homeless shelter, but Perg at least has a family to go back to. They’ve returned to a shattered, defeated nation where their service is treated with contempt. The story properly starts in a boat on the Danube, as a troupe of exhausted, demoralized soldiers come home following two years as prisoners of war in a Russian camp (the scene calls to mind Dracula’s arrival in Whitby). It’s best to pass over the opening, in which the camera closes in on a glowering Peter Perg (Murathan Muslu) silhouetted against a starry sky accompanied by a sententious voiceover, all seemingly lifted from an overdramatic superhero movie. Neus Ballús on Locarno World Premiere 'The Odd-Job Men,' Fear of Others, How the Ordinary is Extraordinary Locarno First Look: 'De Noche Los Gatos Son Pardos,' 'Semret,' 'Reduit' Win Prizes Srdjan Dragojevic Satirizes Life in Post-Communist Eastern Europe in Locarno Awards Contender 'Heavens Above' Caligari.” Instead, with “ Homefront,” the director wants to turn all of Vienna into an unstable, off-kilter cityscape, so blue screen was the only economically viable choice. Ruzowitzky however isn’t content with its hermetic, intimately claustrophobic features in which harsh, jagged angles and precarious constructions become an external manifestation of oppressive psychological forces, made most famous with “The Cabinet of Dr. Given all these elements, it’s not such a leap to envision a reawakening of Expressionism, at its cinematic height in 1919-1920, as an appropriate visual style. With this context, the film foregrounds the story of a traumatized lieutenant returning to his duties as police inspector in Vienna just when an especially sadistic murderer is killing his former comrades. Thematically, the idea was to tackle the impotent rage of the Austro-Hungarian patriarchy whose fanatical belief in Emperor and Empire went up in smoke when the Armistice brushed aside the monarchy and reduced the territory to a state of near insignificance. Whether it’s also fully successful is open for debate. It was a bold move for Stefan Ruzowitzky (“The Counterfeiters” among many others) to conceive of a gritty Expressionist detective-thriller set in the aftermath of World War I, shot almost entirely on blue screen.
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