The Inheritors
Austria/Germany 1997
Reviewed by Geoffrey Macnab
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
Rural Austria, the early 30s. A farmer is murdered. The killer, an elderly peasant woman, is imprisoned. The farmer's will leaves all the land to the peasants who work it. The foreman tries to bully the peasants into selling up to the neighbouring farmer, Danninger. Deciding to tend the land themselves instead, Severin and the rest of the peasants refuse. After working extremely hard to make enough money to pay their taxes, they succeed. The local landowners resent them. At a summer fête, angry words are exchanged between Lukas, one of the seven peasants turned farmers, and Danninger. Later, Danninger and the old foreman steal on to the land and set fire to the barn and crops. The foreman beats up Lukas. When the foreman's back is turned, Lukas thumps him on the head and kills him.
Lukas goes into hiding in the woods, hunted by vagabonds seeking the reward for his capture. Before departing for America, Lukas visits the prison where the murderess is under lock and key - he has learned she is his mother. Lukas was conceived when the farmer raped her years ago, but she isn't pleased to see him. Trying to escape, Lukas shoots the jail warder and several townsfolk and is wounded himself. Danninger leads a posse to the peasants' farm. Emmy, Lukas' old girlfriend, is raped. The others are tied up and tortured. Lukas tries to intervene, but is beaten to death. All the peasants in the area attend Lukas' funeral. Emmy leaves town with Severin but not before they have Danninger murdered.
Review
Stock images of snow-capped mountains and happy little rural communities don't exactly tally with rugged cowboy stereotypes. Nevertheless, Austrian writer/director Stefan Ruzowitzky's description of his second feature (after Fetzig), The Inheritors, as an Alpine Western makes perfect sense. The iconography of this story about small-timers fighting for their land may be different from Shane's, but the struggle is largely the same.
What starts off like a piece of bloody folklore, with the old farmer having his throat slit, gradually becomes a rich and strange allegory which touches on class oppression, rape, property relations, murder and theft. Despite the beauty of the surroundings, there is never any sense of a rural idyll. The storytelling is barbed and ironic. The voiceover narration and Ruzowitzky's eye for the absurd (an elephant passing by the farm, the peasants talking to the cows, the little boy who never speaks) rekindle memories of Volker Schlöndorff's adaptation The Tin Drum. Severin, the narrator, is one of seven peasants who inherit the land when the tyrannical farmer is killed. A dishevelled idiot savant, his seeming naiveté masks considerable insight.
"And now I'm going to hell," reads the will of the murdered farmer. The document is intended as a provocation - he leaves the land to the peasants not out of any sympathy for their plight but because he wants to outrage his fellow farmers. Without his martinet foreman to order them around, it is assumed the farm must fail. This is a strictly hierarchical society, after all. Bosses are bosses, workers are workers. Characters are heard to mutter repeatedly, "a peasant can't be a farmer," as if it is an unshakeable axiom. Even the local priest frowns on the new experiment. In one magnificent shot, Lukas, an illiterate foundling, expresses his delight at his new status by embracing the earth. With the rain lashing down, he rolls around like a puppy in the mud, yelling out, "It's mine now!" He seems an impulsive, simple-minded figure, but he changes during the course of the film as he gains self-respect and learns to read.
Ruzowitzky switches easily between slapstick, comic caricature and a much darker vein. His villain, the obese, bearded bourgeois farmer Danninger, looks as if he has just stumbled from some George Grosz cartoon. In the film's most grotesque scene, we see him finish off an enormous dinner as Emmy, one of the peasant girls, strips in front of him in a bid to save Lukas' life. Venal, lazy, cruel and an inveterate snob, Danninger epitomises all that is worst about patriarchal feudalism. On one level, The Inheritors can be read as a morality fable about the attrition between bosses and workers - a tale of class warfare transplanted to the countryside. On another, it's a coming-of-age story. Emmy, Lukas and Severin are all youngsters perched on the edge of adulthood, idealists pitted against a society which wants to grind them down. The film also works as a murder mystery - only slowly do we learn the tragic details about who killed the farmer and why.
It is to be expected that a rural tale should be cyclical. Seasons roll on, one generation follows another. In The Inheritors Ruzowitzky's protagonists try to break the chain. Their relationship with the land is signalled symbolically: when they are in control, reaping the harvest or tending their cattle, nature itself seems benevolent. When their experiment begins to go awry, the weather changes and the mood darkens. At times, the film resembles an old-fashioned fairytale. The forest in which Lukas hides out from his pursuers is a magical and mysterious place, his foundling story might have come straight from the Brothers Grimm where there is always something dark and disturbing lurking within. The Inheritors ends on a violent but ambivalent note. The peasant-farmers' dream may be shattered, but at least they have planted the seeds of defiance.
Credits
- Producers
- Danny Krausz
- Kurt Stocker
- Screenplay
- Stefan Ruzowitzky
- Director of Photography
- Peter von Haller
- Editor
- Britta Nahler
- Art Director
- Isi Wimmer
- Music
- Erik Satie
- ©Dor Film
- Production Companies
- A Dor Film production in collaboration with
- ORF and BR
- With the support of
- Österreichisches Filminstitut and Filmförderung des Landes Oberösterreich
- Executive Producer
- Manfred Fritsch
- Production Manager
- Stephanie Wagner
- Unit Production Managers
- Martin Dvoracek-Riegler
- Set:
- Peter Muhr
- Post-production
Co-ordinator - Michael Berner
- Assistant Director
- Anton Maria Aigner
- Script Supervisors
- Ruth Blankenstein
- Sabine Derflinger
- Casting
- Barbara Vögel
- Steadicam Operator
- Stefan Biebl
- Special Effects
- Joe Joachim
- Costumes
- Nicole Fischnaller
- Wardrobe
- Patrizia Schömitz
- Make-up
- Helga Klein
- Georgie Schillinger
- Title Design/Graphics
- Bibi Mayer
- Music Arranged/
Performed by - Christian Heitler
- Soundtrack
- "La donna è mobile" from "Rigoletto" by Giuseppe Verdi, performed by Enrico Caruso
- Sound
- Heinz Ebner
- Sound Mixer
- Karoline T. Heflin
- Sound Effects
- Otber Kunert
- Cast
- Sophie Rois
- Emmy
- Simon Schwarz
- Lukas
- Lars Rudolph
- Severin
- Tilo Prückner
- foreman
- Ulrich Wildgruber
- Danninger
- Julia Gschnitzer
- Old Nane
- Susanne Silverio
- Lisbeth
- Kirstin Schwab
- Liesl
- Christoph Gusenbauer
- stable boy
- Werner Prinz
- policeman
- Dietmar Nigsch
- Sepp
- Elisabeth Orth
- Rosalind
- Gertraud Mayböck
- Gertrud
- Norbert Perchtold
- Danninger's nephew
- Michael 'Pogo' Kreiner
- elephant keeper
- Johann Naderer
- priest
- Eddie Fischnaller
- Florian
- Certificate
- 15
- Distributor
- Metrodome Distribution Ltd
- 8,477 feet
- 94 minutes 11 seconds
- In Colour
- Subtitles