Brady Corbet
The Childhood of a Leader - L'infanzia di un capo

The Childhood of a Leader by Brady Corbet, very loosely inspired by a story by Sartre and a novel by John Fowles.

But, aside from these two declared sources, it is with the two famous and important titles by Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Banality of Evil, that one can introduce the viewing of this remarkable film with which the then just twenty-seven-year-old Corbet (class of '88) debuted as a director.

This is a film of impressive stylistic and authorial refinement for a debut.

Corbet cites sources of inspiration of the caliber of Kubrick, Dreyer, Bresson, Olmi. All quite evident while watching the film.

But what comes to mind is also, and indeed especially, Haneke’s The White Ribbon, not coincidentally set during the same decade (the 1910s), but The Childhood of a Leader is set at the end of the war, before the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, which in fact laid the groundwork for movements of revolt to form in the defeated and humiliated Germany following a great social and economic crisis that eventually led to the birth and rise of Nazism. The social consequences of Versailles (a treaty that was also strongly disliked by the greats of the Konservative Revolution, many of whom later became markedly anti-Hitler) led to the creation of conditions of hatred and revenge that allowed an entire people (the most educated in Europe, as we know) to follow such an ideology. The extreme conditions in which post-Versailles Germany found itself are exposed in a great film by Bergman, The Serpent's Egg, an extreme and underrated work (unjustly considered minor) by the great Swedish master.

However, Corbet's film is not about Germany but about the birth of an ego, through the lack of affection, stability, and through anger. Dies Irae, indeed to cite Dreyer's masterpiece. Anger is in fact the protagonist of this film. A coming-of-age novel in four acts, sprout, growth, finally the rise of a strong and negative personality through various episodes of anger and violence.

This film evokes the dark and eternal evils of Europe (in its rural roots, often forgotten or denied by modernity) and of man in general ("it is not the capacity of a single man to be evil, but the lack of courage of many men to be good," says Pattinson), in the compulsion to repeat, in cyclicality. The roots of an Evil, the gaze upon History and a past that is origin. In this sense, Corbet's reference to The Tree of Wooden Clogs appears apt.

How we were, how we are, whose children and grandchildren we are.

Perhaps the final resolution is not full, but it is an extraordinarily ambitious and fascinating work. Notable also is the amazing OST by Scott Walker, incredibly fitting and an important component of the work. The penultimate creation in the great American artist's career, before his passing.

I tell you to see it.