Heiner

The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich; his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.

亚历山大（米基·哈特 Mickey Hardt 饰）的父亲经营着一家香水公司，亚历山大拥有与生俱来的灵敏嗅觉，对香味非常的敏感，因此在事业上给与了父亲许多的帮助。一次偶然中，亚历山大邂逅了名为托尼（瓦莱丽·涅豪斯 Valerie Niehaus 饰）的美丽单亲妈妈，并且震惊的发现托尼的儿子雅诺士拥有着异于常人的嗅觉。　　亚历山大想要培养雅诺士，帮助他成为一名调香师，但是托尼却拒绝了他。然而亚历山大并没有放弃，雅诺士自己也很愿意涉足香水这一行业。随着时间的推移，托尼发现自己渐渐爱上了亚历山大，而亚历山大和雅诺士共同研制出来的爱情香水也诞生了。