32 | JULY 23 • 2020 

N

ikolaus Leytner’
s The 
Tobacconist is marked 
by uneasy tensions. 
When a chance tragedy upends 
a Christian family’
s peaceful 
rural life, they send their only 
son Franz (Simon Morze) to 
pre-Reich Vienna to apprentice 
with family friend Otto Trsnjek, 
a one-legged tobacconist and 
Great War vet, as Nazism 
encroaches on the city. 
Johannes Krisch gives the title 
character a sparky warmth that’
s 
matched by his favored client, an 
aging and largely domesticated 
Sigmund Freud (the now-late 
Bruno Ganz). Both elderly Jews, 
they mentor Franz, linked by 
their stubbornness and taste 
for pleasure (“a very good cigar 
tastes like the world,
” Trsnjek 
says). Their indulgences create 
a straightforward, easy bond in 
which connection over culture 
and taste seems to transcend 
class distinctions.
The film has 
plenty of erotic 
material. Franz 
is enamored 
of a cabaret 
dancer; Trsnjek 
sells porn rags 
in plain brown 
bags; and Freud 
is, well, Sigmund 
Freud. Leytner 
approaches all this with the 
same lack of irony as his char-
acters’
 cigar fixation. They are 
subjects without palpable heat. 
With a visual style defined by 

loamy browns and sepias, every 
shot here’
s nearly monochrome. 
A handful of CGI dream 
sequences are filmed in heavy, 
overbearing blues that recall last 
year’
s Judy. Desire, pleasure and 
adolescent feeling are threatened 
by the shadow of Nazism, as in 
Cabaret. But Laytner feels more 
at home with the opinionated 
codgers than he does his young 
lead, leaving Franz’
s inner life, 
like Freud’
s ideas, more signified 
than felt. 
Charting Nazism’
s growth 
within Vienna, the span in 
which a trickle of hateful ide-
ology swells into a flood, is 
what The Tobacconist shows best. 
Bursting from fringe pamphlets 
into mainstream editorials and 
comedy shows, hate speech and 
harassment switfly become the 
regional climate. This will prove 
familiar to anyone contending 
with our present international 
waves of fascistic governance 
and hate. 
As a Christian, 
Franz is personal-
ly insulated from 
the approaching 
Holocaust. The 
Tobacconist might 
be a bolder film 
if it showed him 
becoming more 
seduced. Still, by 
the end, privilege renders him 
complicit. Franz never says “Heil 
Hitler” to anyone, but eventually 
makes a half-surrender, replying 
to a neighbor: “Same to you.
” 

MENEMSHA FILMS

details 
You can rent The 
Tobacconist for $12 at 
michtheater.org/screen-
ings/the-tobacconist. 
After your purchase, you 
have five days to watch.

Arts&Life

fi
 lm review

The Tobacconist

Film charts the rise of
Nazism in 1930s Vienna.

GEORGE ELKIND CONTRIBUTING WRITER

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