The Tin Drum (1979)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆

The Tin Drum (1979) – V. Schlondorff

It isn’t always comfortable viewing, this story about a boy (Oskar) who at age 3 refuses to grow anymore.  Of course, he still grows through experience (and apparently sexually).  The actor playing Oskar was really 12 at the time – but he looks like a little boy observing and sometimes doing very adult things.  All of this occurs against the back-drop of Poland in the 1930s and 40s; Hitler’s rise (and the corresponding human folly) is the ostensible reason for Oskar to stop growing (to protest against the adult world). However, we are only sometimes alerted to the societal changes that the Nazis brought to this corner of Poland (particularly in the treatment of Charles Aznavour, a Jewish toymaker, and of course on September 1st, 1939) – because director Schlondorff’s attention is elsewhere, on Oskar’s family and their own problems, likely due to the source novel by Gunter Grass, which is by all accounts pretty weird.  As is this film.  (I feel like there is a metaphor or some other symbolism hidden here but I can’t quite locate it – people act cruelly to each other at both the personal and societal levels?).  Probably unforgettable.