Director Volker Schlöndorff’s 12th film, Coup de Grâce (1976), was set during the post-World War I era in the Baltic provinces near Riga, in which Germans, White Russians, Latvians, Estonians and Bolsheviks fought against each other. Aristocratic Sophie de Reval (played by Schlöndorff’s then-wife, actress Margarethe von Trotta) has an affair with her brother’s friend Erich (Matthias Habich), but Erich also appears to have a romantic attachment to her brother. Sophie and Erich’s political alliances change and eventually pit the two against each other, ending in death. Also in the cast were Rüdiger Kirschstein and Valeska Gert, who began her film career in silents working with G.W. Pabst and Greta Garbo, in one of her final performances. Schlöndorff was a film student at the Institut des Haute Etudes Cinematographic in Paris before becoming an assistant director for Louis Malle, Alain Resnais and Jean-Pierre Melville. He chose to shoot this film in black-and-white and on location in Burgenland, Austria. Coup de Grâce was based on French author Marguerite Yourcenar’s 1957 novel, with the screenplay adapted by Geneviève Dormann, Jutta Brückner and Margarethe von Trotta, and produced by Argos Films and Schlöndorff’s Bioskop Film, which he formed in 1973 after the West German commercial film industry collapsed. Coup de Grâce would earn Schlöndorff a Best Direction Film Award in Gold at the 1977 German Film Awards. In his review for The New York Times, critic Vincent Canby called Coup de Grâce "an extremely studied, sorrowful movie, photographed in a fine, chilly black and white that has the important effect of removing the story even further away from our emotions. We don't respond to it viscerally. We contemplate it with a certain amount of detachment, which, in this movie era of fast-cutting and obligatory shock, is almost refreshing.”
by Lorraine LoBianco
