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Chess story stefan zweig5/22/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() On the night before the annexation, Nazi goons arrest Josef and deliver him to a hotel where secret police operative Franz-Josef Böhm (Albrecht Schuch) attempts to persuade him to give up codes to the bank accounts of his aristocrat clients. Even the trope of a changing mustache to differentiate between the two timelines is in place.īut it’s a red herring. Philipp Stölzl sets the audience up for a bog-standard narrative, with the present action to take place on Josef’s transatlantic journey punctuated by flashbacks to show the trials that brought him to this pivotal juncture. Set in Austria in the aftermath of the Anschluss, this adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella The Royal Game follows the bon vivant and notary Josef Bartok (Oliver Masucci), an Austrian who, far from being a troubled genius whose sole tether to the world is 64 black and white squares, dismisses chess as a “game for bored Prussian generals.” The film opens in medias res as he boards the steamer Ulysses bound for America under a fake passport, unexpectedly reuniting with his wife, Anna (Birgit Minichmayr). And Philipp Stölzl’s almost counterintuitive solution is to withhold the game until halfway through Chess Story’s runtime. ![]() Any film aiming to dramatize chess will have to grapple with the problem of how to make it look exciting-say, by staging high-stakes matches between neurasthenic grandmasters as proxies for geopolitical conflict. Chess doesn’t lend itself to the restless medium of action and spectacle that cinema is prone to. ![]()
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