Chess Story Review: Stefan Zweig Adaptation Sheds Cold Light on Historical Trauma

Chess Story craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller.

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Chess Story
Photo: Film Movement

Chess doesn’t lend itself to the restless medium of action and spectacle that cinema is prone to. Any film aiming to dramatize chess will have to grapple with the problem of how to make it look exciting—say, by staging high-stakes matches between neurasthenic grandmasters as proxies for geopolitical conflict. And Philipp Stölzl’s almost counterintuitive solution is to withhold the game until halfway through Chess Story’s runtime.

Set in Austria in the aftermath of the Anschluss, this adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s novella The Royal Game follows the bon vivant and notary Josef Bartok (Oliver Masucci), an Austrian who, far from being a troubled genius whose sole tether to the world is 64 black and white squares, dismisses chess as a “game for bored Prussian generals.” The film opens in medias res as he boards the steamer Ulysses bound for America under a fake passport, unexpectedly reuniting with his wife, Anna (Birgit Minichmayr). Philipp Stölzl sets the audience up for a bog-standard narrative, with the present action to take place on Josef’s transatlantic journey punctuated by flashbacks to show the trials that brought him to this pivotal juncture. Even the trope of a changing mustache to differentiate between the two timelines is in place.

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But it’s a red herring. On the night before the annexation, Nazi goons arrest Josef and deliver him to a hotel where secret police operative Franz-Josef Böhm (Albrecht Schuch) attempts to persuade him to give up codes to the bank accounts of his aristocrat clients. Intuiting that his life will be worth nothing to his captors once he relinquishes the codes, Josef refuses and is subjected to the “special treatment,” locked away in one of the hotel rooms without any books, newspapers, or contact with the outside world. Böhm’s calculated strategy is to bore him into capitulation, and it’s here that Chess Story’s real concerns become clear.

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Stölzl takes advantage of the elasticity of cinematic time to affect the subjective “disappearance of time and space” that Böhm pridefully attributes to his method of torture. Jump cuts elide and superimpositions double the rhythms of passing time as Josef repeats from memory the invocation to the muse in The Odyssey. His captors supply him with a cigarette a day but no lighter. We see him snap his fingers to mime the mechanism of a lighter and pretend to smoke before placing the cigarette in a drawer. He finds himself mourning the death of a housefly, which, though initially a source of irritation, has become a companion in suffering. Later on, a guard searches his room and discovers the drawer full of cigarettes arranged into bundles of five, like tally marks; months have passed since Josef’s imprisonment. Mirroring this temporal disintegration, Josef’s behavior aboard the ship in the present timeline becomes unhinged.

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On his way to an interrogation, Josef manages to secret a chess manual slated for the bonfire into his clothing. At long last, we witness how the game becomes Josef’s last resort of sanity and dignity before mutating into a source of madness, his world contracting to the size of a chess board. Aboard the Ulysses, Josef’s fellow passengers draw him into a match against the mysterious Hungarian chess savant Mirko Czentovic (also played by Schuch). As Böhm’s special treatment loses effectiveness, the Nazis revert to more traditional interrogation methods and Josef, to distract himself from the pain, calls on memories of Anna which, under pressure, take on all the force of hallucination. Meanwhile, it becomes clear in the present action that Anna isn’t on the ship at all, as Josef’s coping mechanisms have taken on a life of their own.

With a disturbing shot that pits the elegant, mustached Josef in a chess match against his own naked and degraded self, any distinction between what Josef imagines and what he experiences falls away, as Chess Story collapses its two timelines into one. It becomes impossible to determine whether we’re dealing with flashbacks or flashforwards and which is really the “present action,” effectively soldering the audience to Josef’s deranged subjectivity in a Chekhovian portrayal of descent into madness as compassionate as it is despairing. As such, Stölzl craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, not for the purposes of reheated nostalgia, but to shed a cold light on the recursions of historical trauma.

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 Cast: Oliver Masucci, Rolf Lassgård, Albrecht Schuch, Birgit Minichmayr, Moritz von Treuenfels  Director: Philipp Stölzl  Screenwriter: Eldar Grigorian  Distributor: Film Movement  Running Time: 110 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

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