Unquestioned totalitarianism

Rating: 2/10 (17 February 1999)

Actually, the topic of this film could be quite interesting. Its narrative, as I view it, is characterised by the move from bad to worse. It offers considerable psychological insight into how easily students, in a very strictly ordered environment that gives them very little freedom, can fall pray to a kind of sectarian leader who demands that they worship him as their 'captain' and lose the sense of reality.
Two very different faces of totalitarianism are contrasted in a very interesting way. In principle, it should not matter that much that this is probably not what was intended.
Dostoyevski, for instance, was a staunch conservative who propounded a conservative nationalist and religious ideology, which did not prevent him from writing novels that show an astonishing variety of ideological and philosophical topoi. Therefore, it should not matter that much that, as it seems, the totalitarian action of the teacher was probably intended as a positive contrast to the strict order that is there at the college. But, in my view, in this case, the ideological purpose nevertheless affects the quality of this film. It is good for provoking thought about sectarian totalitarianism, but that's all. The pervasiveness of the ideological purpose dominates the whole story so much that most of the interesting qualities of the situation get lost.
I would say that this is a most typically American film, in the slightly derogatory sense this word often has to Europeans when used in cultural issues: It is dominated by ideas, such as freedom, but the words remain empty, devoid of liveliness, and there is not the slightest hint of the idea that flight from authoritarian order could mean something else than following a sectarian leader. I do not object to depicting such bleakness in movies, and it must probably be regarded as an achievement of this film that it can produce such repulsion in people who are not familiar with this kind of authoritarian society, but the bleakness is disguised in such a nice and kitschy American stereotypes, such as striving for freedom, that I find it just bad taste.