Presented as an official selection at the Cannes Festival, The disappearance of Josef Mengele is the adaptation of the eponymous novel by the French Oliver Guez. The feature film traces Josef Mengele's run. Named « Angel of Death », this senior of the Wehrmacht, which became infamous for his experiments on deportees from Auschwitz camp, managed to escape international justice until his death. It was Russian filmmaker Serebrennikov who made this film in black and white from the original perspective of the fugitive SS. A movie where « regret has no place » as Mengele himself will pronounce before his son.
The angel of death has no remorse
Especially productive, the director of Leto, Petrov fever or Tchaikovsky's Woman We were disappointed for the first time in the previous edition of the Cannes Film Festival. He presented a literary adaptation by Emmanuel Carrère on Limonov, sulphurous character having multiplied identities, first revolutionary poet, then homeless, dissident of the USSR, writer and finally... unlikely support of Vladimir Putin at the end of life. A year later, the one who is certainly one of the best filmmakers of his generation returns to the level of his previous films with the character of Mengele, much better built than that of Limonov. Just decorated with the Legion of Honour, at 55, Serebrennikov already has an impressive work behind him. And The disappearance of Josef Mengele will certainly be among his greatest successes.
Behind the torturer Josef Mengele, we find the remarkable August Diehl who unfortunately will not be able to compete in the Men's Performance Award as The disappearance was simply selected in the Cannes first section. It's all the more cruel as the brilliant German actor who dipped the spotlight in The Master and Margarita (read our critical), delivers a stunning performance. His acting game is sublimated by the talent of Serebrennikov who knows how to film his subjects and capture their torments as no one else.
Here the director chooses to adopt the patina and register of black films, as if it were an investigation but from the perspective of the fugitive. Amplifying the feeling of paranoia, the camera sticks to Josef Mengele with travels on this fallen Nazi dignitary. Defeat obliges, he sees the world escaping from him as he admits half-word on these old days: « The world ages and rejuvenates at the same time ». In perpetual flight, Mengele will never cease to dream of taking revenge on history, not without nourishing a frustration that will gnaw him to the marrow. Unable to mourn the Reich and condemned to live reclusive, far from the world populated by Daryans whom he once dreamed, Mengele will recognize his impotence in a rare impulse of lucidity.
« The war does not stop at the same time for everyone. »
The captains of industry and the Germanic people who had largely supported the Führer, some being rid of the trade the Death during the war, why would his person be hunted as if he were the only one responsible, asked Mengele with anger. Anxiety arises when Mossad captures in Argentina Eichmann, one of the great artisans of the Holocaust. Another point which makes all the singularity of The disappearance, for the allies, what was a liberation figure is experienced for the SS as a great collapse. Like other Nazis in exile, Mengele initially hoped that the Reich would rise from its ashes in Germany. And why not in South America like the fantasy of these companions caught up with an unlikely reality that will never happen in their lifetime.
Alternating between the different riders of the SS life who will know several identities, Mengele is a sordid character filled with hatred that seems inexhaustible. It is never about humanizing, since the torturer of Auschwitz is imprisoned in the most total denial. Serebrennikov gives an increasingly pathetic portrait of Mengele while leaving no space for pity. It is only when Mengele remembers the memories of his first wife, when Nazism was at its peak, that the image suddenly turns into color. The change of photography surprises when we discover this bathing scene at the edge of a field of yellow flowers. It's a lost paradise for Mengele. An idea of staging which, as usual at Serebrennikov, is full of meaning.
The irruption of the brilliant colour limits to the obscene, whereas it is also used to illustrate these memories of experiments on deportees. The film's cinemascope format tightens and then adopts that of the period cameras used to document the abuses committed in Auschwitz by the Nazis themselves. Unlike some other deviant scientists who have committed similar facts, historical documents claim that Mengele was often seen smiling or whistled a song when he took his guinea pigs for the « study ».
The disappearance of Josef Mengele exposes the biography of this war criminal who began his life as an anthropologist before becoming the monster we know. This is what the first images of the film show, where faculty students work on Mengele's skeleton. Irony of fate, the one who was happy to dissect his victims, was himself identified by DNA analyses carried out on his skeleton exhumed in 1985, many years after his death. The disappearance is a film to follow as a polar all the more disturbing as it is not a fiction. From the Mengele skeleton to the first fully naked appearance of Auguste Diehl observing in the ice, the camera will sweep all of its being. From head to toe, The disappearance is an icy autopsy of a Reich monster and a film to be seen in cinema.
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