7.3
Plot summary
Sergeant Major Eismayer, the toughest training officer in the Austrian Armed Forces, has a secret he carefully hides from public view: he is homosexual. When he falls in love with a recruit, his artificial heteronormative existence is shaken to the core. To a man like Eismayer, a gay relationship cannot be reconciled with the traditional understanding of what a soldier should be. Will he preserve his image of a tough-as-nails man's man or follow his heart? Is there some way to do both? Based on real events.—Golden Girls Film
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
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Some films are frustrating because the director lingers on every scene for too long after making their point. This film has the opposite problem: too much is left unsaid/unexplained. Dramatic scenes are cut short and the plot moves on with the viewer wondering exactly what happened. For example:
- we get very little of Eismayer's backstory, which would have helped us to understand why he was so macho
- despite being a fitness fanatic and having cancer, why does Eismayer smoke so much? And how does he survive?
- why was Falak so afraid to cross the bridge and what exactly happened when they both fell in the water?
- how and when did Eismayer fall in love with Falak?
- what did Falak see in a much older guy who displays almost no kindness or tenderness (except toward his son)?
- how did the wife deal with her husband finally admitting he was gay?
- what was the repeated scene of the abandoned building in winter meant to symbolise/represent?
Maybe there were lots of subtle signs that I missed (please don't shoot me) but, most importantly, the overall effect on me was that the romance seemed to come out of nowhere and develop very quickly, for reasons that were hard to understand.
Nevertheless, I thought the film was well-acted and well-made. The crowd-pleasing happy ending is well done and not over-done. Still, the film could have been a much more in-depth character study of the two men and the relationship between them.