All they had to do was to reject the strictures and structures of the society within which they lived. But youth could be a “rebellious and dissident force”, wild and savage and free. They were always, in Andrew Hussey’s précis, “associated with sport, fitness, serving society and above all obedience”. Isou’s premise was that definitions of youth as a separate class, a cohort, had hitherto been dictated by adults, authorities, regimes. Or maybe not: from an early age, Isou was convinced that he was a religious figure, if not the Messiah. This remarkable document set out a vision of youth as a revolutionary class – a vision that within two decades would be realised with a force that went beyond Isou’s wildest imaginings. The posters trailed the latest pamphlet by Isou, entitled “ Traite de l’economie nucleaire: Soulevement de la jeunesse” (“Treatise of Nuclear Economics: Youth Uprising!”). They were put up by the Lettristes, an avant-garde group willed into being by the febrile brain of Isidore Isou, a 24-year-old Romanian Jew who, barely surviving the Holocaust, had arrived in Paris just after the war with the express intention of taking the capital by storm. Dullness prevails, and Kleist’s cruel ironies never really get a look-in.In mid-1949, posters began to appear all over the Left Bank of Paris, announcing that “12 million young people would soon be coming down the street to make the Lettriste revolution”. As good as he may have been in other fare, in this instance that is simply asking too much. Adding in a daughter and a few other characters doesn’t compensate, dramatically or emotionally, since we’re expected most of the time to seek any depth or nuances in the many close-ups of Mads Mikkelsen’s tanned face. The film also feels undernourished in terms of scale whereas the book involved mass carnage as the vengeful protagonist and his band roamed widely from town to town, the film offers a number of fairly low-profile rural skirmishes. This paring back only serves to make the precise legal and logistical details of Kohlhaas’s mission less comprehensible than in the novella. Transplanting the action from Germany to the Cevennes and almost exclusively using exterior locations was an unwise move, and though Pallieres has spoken of his desire to make a kind of western, the changes simply highlight the way he has stripped down the original narrative. #AGE OF REBELLION BOOKS MOVIE#Unfortunately, Arnaud de Pallieres’s film succeeds neither as a decent adaptation of the book nor as a rewarding movie in its own right. It’s related in an extraordinarily modern-feeling matter-of-fact style and deals with themes that still preoccupy us today. The story concerns a sixteenth-century merchant resorting to fanatical and violent extremes in his quest to obtain justice after a wealthy noble openly and illegally humiliates him by stealing two of his horses. Heinrich von Kleist’s 1811 novella ‘Michael Kohlhaas’ is one that remains both remarkably readable and remarkably relevant.
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