‘Reunion’: A Coming-of-Age Second World War Film Belatedly Comes of Age

For most of this month New York has played host to the most welcome of cultural “reunions.” The re-release of “Reunion”, a 1989 drama directed by Jerry Schatzberg and scripted by Harold Pinter, based on the 1971 novel by Fred Uhlman, has been a smash hit at the Film Forum, earning a two week extension at the downtown repertory movie theater.A brilliant, bittersweet coming-of-age film has itself come of age. “Reunion,” chronicling how the friendship between two teenage boys in Germany in 1933 gets thrown in turmoil by the rise of the Nazis and the accompanying escalation in antisemitism, received the most perfunctory of releases in 1991. After that the movie got weighed down by rights issues, was never even getting a DVD release.Mr. Schatzberg, a former photographer, is still with us at the age of 98. Celebrated playwright Pinter died in 2008. The director’s visuals and the scriptwriter’s way with words combined to make “Reunion”, for my money, among the most special films of the last half a century. Just how special “Reunion” is can be seen by the fact that, aside from Philippe Sarde’s jaunty score, the weakest link in the film is supplied by the late, great Jason Robards. Not that there’s anything wrong with his characteristically august performance, nor is there anything amiss with Pinter structuring the film by having the first third comprise Robards’ elderly Jewish New York lawyer Henry Strauss, formerly Hans, returning to Germany for the first time since he fled the country in the run-up to World War II.“Reunion” is accordingly a slow-burner that catches dramatic fire when we flashback to the school meeting of the aristocratic Count Konradin von Lohenburg and bourgeois Jew Strauss, both superbly played by Samuel West and Christien Anholt. The intimate relatability of their innocent exchanges about growing up and girls is, in its own way, as striking as the unusual political circumstances that will soon tear apart their lives.Just as Mr. Schatzberg’s unfussy, eclectic directorial style — “Reunion” is about as different a film as his previous credit, 1987’s underrated media thriller “Street Smart”, as it’s possible for two movies to be — provides a knockout counterweight to Pinter’s economical narrative force, so Mr. West’s sensitive suaveness supplies a perfect foil to Mr. Anholt’s endearing, scrappy awkardness.The profound differences between the two boys’ families enables identity and class to sear through “Reunion.” Hans’s father, who possesses tragically misplaced loyalty towards his native country, describes himself at one point as a “German Jew. The kind who goes to synagogue on Yom Kippur and sings ‘Silent Night’ on Christmas.” Contrastingly, Konradin confesses to Hans his Nazi-sympathizer mother is “afraid of [Jews] though she has never met one.”According to Charles Grimes’s 2005 book “Harold Pinter’s Politics: A Silence Beyond Echo,” Mr Pinter said of “Reunion,” “I did more research on this script than I have ever done in my life.” Pinter’s work pays off handsomely; scene after scene smoulders with historical force. As the Nazi’s strengthen their grip in Stuttgart, Konradin painfully snubs Strauss at the opera; Countess Gertrud, a cousin of Konradin, brilliantly played by Shebah Ronay, tells Strauss he “doesn’t look like a Jew,” with the pair experiencing the most awkward of reunions over half a century later.“Reunion” is fraught with tragic reckoning and tender poignancy but it never comes close to being contrived or overwrought. The last line of the film stops the viewer in their tracks, typifying the quiet ferocity that runs throughout the film, and lodging itself so firmly in my mind I’m tempted to send Mr. Schatzberg an invoice for rent. After its Film Forum run finishes, Rialto Pictures is rolling it out in selected theaters nationwide and touchingly, for the film’s re-release, has re-united Messrs West and Anholt for a brief pre-screening Zoom introduction.Back in 1991, a film suffused with such tenderness, subtletly and intelligence, would have been rare. Nowadays, “Reunion” is truly one of a kind.

‘Reunion’: A Coming-of-Age Second World War Film Belatedly Comes of Age

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