Neutrality has a price.
2023-11-10
N/A
88 min
Spring 1945, Heinrich Zwygart, Swiss ambassador to Germany flees bombed-out Berlin after eight years of service in the capital of the Reich. This is the end of a terrible mandate, during which he had to make fatal compromises to preserve the neutrality and security of his country. He went through the war, but will he survive the peace?
Michael Neuenschwander is quite effective here as the returning Swiss ambassador ("Zwygart") from the Nazi regime at the end of WWII. He arrives at his family home to discover that his loving daughter has a new boyfriend "Nicolas" (Yann Philipona). Meantime, his boss arrives to thank him for his work and to listen to his suggestions for post-war rapprochement with the Americans. It looks like this man's career is going to thrive and that his family is going to be happy. Well that sensation doesn't prevail for long. Pretty quickly he discovers that his government are way more interested in what's to come rather than what went before, and that his actions during the conflict are to be forgotten, if not proactively denied - as is he! Meantime, it also becomes clear that the boyfriend has an agenda of his own - and that centres around the behaviour of the emissary years earlier in regard to a young Swiss man "Maurice" (Victor Poltier) who ended up under the guillotine. The use of almost haunting flashback demonstrates well the increasing pressure on this increasingly vulnerable and lonely man as he starts to crack. Why did he do what he did (or didn't)? How complicit was his government? Will anyone listen now? It's quite a tautly directed story this, but it's missing too much substance. There's just not enough context to illustrate what this man is supposed to have done in the interests of a frightened nation. There's the strained relationship with his father (a strong performance from Peter Wyssbrod) that isn't really explained well either and by the end I just wanted to know more than I was being presented with by auteur Laurent Nègre. It does offer us an interesting treatise on just how quickly winning the war became winning the peace, and of just how "neutrality" was maybe not quite what it said on the tin - but I wanted more meat on the bones.
