Schachnovelle (2021)

The film tells two storylines set at different times, shown in parallel through numerous cross-cuts. March 1938, in Vienna: Notary Dr. Josef Bartok underestimates until the very last moment the danger Hitler poses to Austria, and is caught off guard by Austria’s annexation by Nazi Germany. Only at the last minute does he persuade his wife Anna to flee. The Nazis arrest him and take him to the Hotel Métropole, which has been turned into the Vienna Gestapo headquarters. The senior Gestapo officer Franz-Josef Böhm knows that Bartok manages the assets of the old Austrian nobility, and wants the access codes to the relevant foreign accounts. Bartok refuses, and the Nazis set out to break him through solitary confinement. He is locked up indefinitely in a small hotel room with a window overlooking only a dreary inner courtyard, and with no reading material or human company. The deprivation of mental stimulation wears Bartok down; he is desperate for intellectual activity. Still, he does not reveal the codes, because he fears he will be killed afterward. By a stroke of luck during an interrogation, he gets hold of a book that was meant to be burned. To his disappointment, he discovers that it contains not literature but chess games. Chess had never interested Bartok, but to keep his mind occupied, he plays through the games, at first using pieces made of bread on the tiles of his bathroom floor. When first the pieces and then the book are taken away from him, he plays new games in his head. Chess, the only activity available to him, takes over his entire personality to such an extent that during interrogations he writes down chess games instead of the requested codes. Even the execution of a friend before his eyes does not make him break. As punishment, the bathroom entrance and the window onto the courtyard are bricked up, forcing Bartok to live by the light of a bare bulb, with only a metal bucket for a toilet. After a year of deprivation, Bartok finally manages to “escape” by losing his mind. Released as mentally incompetent, he signs his discharge papers as Max van Leuwen, the name of a chess master from the stolen textbook who played world champion Mirko Czentovic in 1928. At the end, Bartok gets back his wristwatch, which had been taken from him at the start of his imprisonment. Then he staggers uncertainly out into the sunlight. In a parallel storyline, Bartok, now under the assumed identity Max van Leuwen, travels by ship from Rotterdam to the United States, accompanied by his wife Anna. It later becomes clear, however, that he is only imagining Anna’s presence. He is hallucinating and clearly bears the marks of his long solitary confinement. A chess tournament is taking place aboard the ship: accompanied by his manager Koller, the reigning world chess champion Mirko Czentovic plays simultaneous games for money against anyone who wants to challenge him. Van Leuwen watches over the shoulder of one of the opponents, Owen McConnor, the owner of the ship. He impulsively stops McConnor from making a tempting move, then manages to draw from a losing position. Czentovic easily defeats all the other opponents. McConnor invites van Leuwen to play Czentovic in a match of his own. During the game, van Leuwen begins hallucinating again, but eventually wins. As his prize, he receives Czentovic’s wristwatch, which is strikingly similar to the one confiscated from him by the Gestapo. The ship’s voyage to New York is part of the hallucinations caused by his solitary confinement. It is the Gestapo officer Böhm who sits opposite him as Mirko Czentovic in the chess game. They play the game published in the chess book, which Czentovic loses to van Leuwen. Thus, the wristwatch Bartok recovers as Max van Leuwen is his own. The final shots show Bartok as a resident of a locked psychiatric facility. He sits in the sunshine beside a chess game. A woman sits next to him who looks like Anna and whose voice seems familiar to Bartok, but they address each other formally. The woman tells Bartok that she has come to visit from America, that it is possible to travel again now, and that the war is over. Then she reads aloud to him from Homer’s Odyssey, a work he once greatly admired. Now Bartok seems not to know the book and shows curiosity about its contents. It remains unclear whether Anna is truly visiting Bartok, who may be suffering from severe amnesia, or whether he is hallucinating here too. But much suggests that it is Anna who is trying to bring Bartok back to his old life by reading Homer’s Odyssey to him, since the Odyssey, unlike chess, was an important symbol of Western culture for Bartok.