Dirs: Lukas Stepanik, Robert Schindel. Austria 2002. 115mins

Adapted from Robert Schindel's own successful novel of the same name, this Austrian candidate for the 2002 foreign Oscars delivers one of the more intelligent, caustic and lucid films made on the country's share in Nazi guilt, an issue that has been repeatedly discussed but remains unsettled, almost 60 years after the end of World War II. While the answers provided by Schindel and Lukas Stepanik may not please everybody, it certainly shows that time has not eased troubled consciences. Serious audiences capable of facing subtitles and willing to tackle themes of such gravity are bound to appreciate it.

Taking place in 1987, when Kurt Waldheim was President of the Austrian Republic and controversy was raging around his war record as a Wehrmacht officer, the film remains as topical and appropriate in Joerg Heider's Austria today. It follows several characters of Viennese origins who are trying to deal with their own or, more often, their parents' past, and to come to terms with it in the present. Herman Gebirtig (Simonischek), survived Auschwitz as a child but lost all his family there, emigrated to the US, became a successful songwriter and by now mistakenly believes he has put the whole of the Atlantic Ocean between himself and his past, until he is lured back to Vienna against his better judgement to testify in the trial of a former Auschwitz guard, infamously known as the Skull Cracker.

Danny Demant (Zirner), is a second generation Holocaust survivor - a stand-up comic whose act lashes out at his Austrian audiences, telling them that Vienna, 'once the capital of anti-Semitism, is now the capital of forgetting'. Tempted, despite himself, to take a bit part in an American Holocaust epic being shot in Austria, he discovers that putting on the costume of a concentration camp inmate and facing other stand-ins, dressed as guards, affects him far more deeply than he had expected. Then there is the star reporter of a popular Hamburg magazine, Konrad Sachs (Olbrychski), covering both the trial and the film production, who tries to live down the memory of his late father, a SS doctor experimenting on Nazi victims.

Susanne Ressel (Rieser), Demant's former girl friend, is Sachs' colleague, a reporter whose non-Jewish father was sent to the camps for his political opinions; the other main female character, Crissie (Weizenboeck), Demant's new love interest, is a young doctor who sees this insistence on digging up the past as a morbid preoccupation that should not concern a world which has more urgent tasks to deal with.

Deft editing cuts back and forth from the present to the past revived in the trial and the past as re-staged in the American production, replete with all the genre's usual cliches. In contrast with the grim theme, the script uses a sharply ironical, self-deprecatory approach, with Demant's commentary tying together the entire package. Situations are smartly twisted around to take audiences by surprise and the thrust of a scene may change several times before it is over.

Distinctly verbose - which means lots of subtitles for non-German audiences - the script is nevertheless right on target, whether it speaks of Austria's complacency with its own national record, the pain and anguish smouldering under the skin of those who think they have escaped the terrible memories of the camps, or the effect of a film industry that uses the Holocaust as just another piece of raw material for show business.

Wit, anger and despair blend in equal parts in this remarkable script. While Edward Klosinski's camera work is excellent, it is the spoken word that drives home the film's message, thanks to an able cast headed by Simonischek and Zirner; only Olbrychski, who evidently has little sympathy for his role, overplays his hand.

Prod co: Cult FilmVienna, Extra Film Vienna with Dazu Films, Koln, Akson Studio, Warsaw
Prods: Niki List, Burkhard Ernst
Austrian dist: Filmladen Verleih
Int'l sales: Austrian Film Commission
Co-prods: Lukas Stepanik, Daniel Zuta, Michal Kwiecinski
Scr: Georg Stefan Troller, Robert Schindel, Lukas Stepanik
Cinematography: Edward Klosinki
Ed: Hubert Canaval
Prod des: Friedrich Hollergschandtmer
Costumes: Erika Navas
Music: Peter Ponger
Sound: Thomas Schmidt-Gentner
Main cast: Peter Simonischek, Ruth Rieser, August Zirner, Katja Weitzenboeck, Daniel Olbrychski, Corinna Harfouch, Samuel Finzi