Film – »Der Brutalist« im Kino: One for You, One for Me

The statement by Brady Corbets and Mona Fastvold’s feature film “The Brutalist” can be summarized in one sentence: Instead of migrating to the anti -Semitic USA, the survivors of the Holocaust should have gone to Israel. A feature film cannot prove anything, but show something. Using many examples, this shows that the United States was an anti -Semitic country in the 1950s, even if the typical combination of anti -Semitism and anti -communism is left out. As we know from the protocols of the McCarthy hearings, who was communist at the time, also as Jewish and vice versa. So that doesn’t happen. But above all, and that is more important, Israel does not appear.

The film has 200 minutes to tell its story, but not a single plays in Jerusalem, where Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy), the hero’s niece, emigrates because she considers it to be “duty” (obligation). At the very end and in the narrated time 30 years later she appears (then played by Ariane Labed). She wants to seem to have a good life in Israel behind, but how it went and whether her famous uncle, a modernist architect, would have been able to cope with her country.

From Heinz Emigholz ‘Documentation “Bickels Socialism” (2017) about the Israeli architect Shmuel (Samuel) Bickels we know that modern is built in Israel. The modernist architects Richard Kauffmann, Shlomo Oren-Weinberg and Arieh Sharon also looked on site. The tradition of the Bauhaus, in which the fictional and elegantly played “brutalist” László Tóth is said to be elegantly played, had even longer existed in Israel than in Central Europe or in the USA. Corbet and Fastvold did not want to pursue this trace. The question of why Tóth, a creditor Jew, prefers to be abused by rich Americans than to follow his niece remains open.

The first freedom that the newcomer Tóth takes in New York is the brothel and a brothel will remain the country for him – but with him as the prostitute.

In “The Brutalist”, two more, much less special stories can be seen: one is often (preferably from Jonas Mekas) told of immigrants in the USA, the other the well -known genius and patron. The “brutalist” has nothing to contribute to these two subject areas. Although Tóth and his compiled wife (Felicity Jones) and his niece speak perfectly English, they don’t hit it much better than other migrants until our day: You can show them that they are not desirable, you are in shots, you give you up You bad jobs. After all, even if the Statue of Liberty rises wrongly, you can hope for some freedom.

The first freedom that the newcomer Tóth takes in New York is the brothel and a brothel will remain the country for him – but with him as the prostitute. Because, and with that the second story begins, the millionaire van Buren, who wants to immortalize himself in a grandiose building, the van Buren Center, considers its highly gifted architect to be a shoe cleaner, then a stricter.

Van Buren is given nice and greasy by the Guy Pearce living in Australia. And if he is not disgusting enough, it is his silly patterned ties. He is even exceeded in rogue art by Joe Alwyn in the role of his submissive son Harry. Father and son are out of dated racists, anti -Semites, snobs and veritable rapists. Yes, they are more rapists, both in the heterosexual and in homosexual variant. However, one wonders whether a plutocrat must still be angry. Isn’t it enough that he is a plutocrat? And if he is supposed to be angry, for example, like the dictator’s wife Imelda Marcos, could he let construction workers die in liquid concrete so that the building (in your case the Manila Film Center) will soon be finished?

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That would have been close because brutalism builds with concrete. So briefly to the title: Brutalism did not arise in the United States, but in the mid -1950s in the UK and has the slightest to do with “brutal”. Rather, the word goes back to the fact that one of the earliest representatives of this architecture style, Peter Smithson, was called by his friends “Brutus”. (More in Hermann Funke: “Architecture Reviews”, 2022) There were unadorned buildings from concrete earlier. So the film title is a pun, because, so you think until the film’s epilogue, only the financier and not the artist is brutally here.

The epilogue brings an astonishing reversal (and I say goodbye to everyone who wants to watch the film). The Van Buren Center, which is supposed to build Tóth, is dominated by a Christian cross that lets two huge concrete pillars strive up into the sky. Despite the building of the building that was still daring at the time, this works like a Kotau in front of the new gentlemen. In the end, however, the niece reveals that the concrete pillars and the whole brutalist style are memories of László Tóths to the Buchenwald concentration camp. This is the only interesting idea that the film has to offer, and the first of two surprises. The second is that Corbet and Fastvold dedicated their work Scott Walker, one of the great pop musicians of the last century. In the film, however, there is not a single song from Walker and only a piece that is more than a cozy accompaniment: “One for you, one for me” from the Italian discistra La Bionda accompanies the epilogue. You can then only read this title more than the motto at the Buchenwald goal: “Everyone is his”.

“The brutalist”, Great Britain, USA, Hungary 2024. Director: Brady Corbet; Book: Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold. With: Adrien Brody, Felicity Jones, Guy Pearce, Joe Alwyn, Raffey Cassidy. 215 min. Heavy of the cinema: January 30th.