The Disappearance of Josef Mengele – first-look…

Kirill Serebrennikov had a film in competition for the Palme d’Or at three of the first four Cannes Film Festivals post-COVID, a period immediately following his unjust conviction, in his native Russia, on trumped-up charges of embezzlement from the state-funded theatre of which he was president — widely understood to be politically motivated persecution of a dissident artist.

Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Serebrennikov’s self-imposed exile to Berlin. As a gadfly figure in Russian culture, he was known for taking on protagonists with knotty, oppositional politics, portraying Soviet-era rock punks, flu-stricken comic artists, delusional spouses and radical poets as flawed antiheroes tearing through the fabric of society — often literally, in strutting, rock-and-roll tracking shots across elaborate sets that were liable to collapse midway through the scene, breaking the fourth wall and piercing the veil.

Serebrennikov is back in Cannes with his first German-language film and the first to complete principal photography since he left Russia; it’s about a German antihero this time. The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, which covers the life of Auschwitz’s “angel of death” in hiding in South America in the decades after the fall of the Reich, is a study of a fellow exile, but one still loyal to his homeland, and who moved, before then at least, in lockstep with his government and with his historical moment.

Perhaps it’s Serebrennikov’s contempt for a protagonist he has every claim of superiority to; perhaps it’s in deference to what is still a sore subject in his adopted homeland and beyond, but in comparison to his recent work, the film’s politics are more legible and respectable — and its style more staid.

“We can learn a lot from these bones,” says an avuncular medical school instructor in modern-day Brazil in the film’s first scene, inviting his students to think about forensics – and history – while contemplating the remains of a doctor whose spirit of inquiry was far less scientific: Dr. Mengele, who sorted arrivals at Auschwitz for the gas chambers and conducted sadistic experiments, like attempting to produce blue eyes by injecting chemical dyes, in support of Nazi race theories.

Largely historically accurate in its outlines, the film follows Mengele’s life in Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, under a series of aliases and in decreasing comfort and health, from bourgeois ease to hardscrabble rusticity to decrepit poverty. The chronology hopscotches around; as Mengele, August Diehl grows contorted with age (at the end of his character’s life he looks and moves much older than 67) in the kind of showy performance Serebrennikov favours, one that spans impossible changes in circumstance with the help of stage makeup.

Shooting in widescreen and black and white, with a score of noir saxophone and Joker cello, Serebrennikov gives Mengele’s story the high-gloss, high-contrast look of a noir; though he still prefers to work in long takes, his perspective feels coiled, aligned with a character who paces like a caged animal. The cinematography is mostly not showy, except at Mengele’s 1950s wedding (divorced from his first wife by proxy, he married his brother’s widow in Uruguay), the best scene of the film, which is covered in a single Steadicam moving from the parlour where wedding guests in Iron Crosses Sieg Heil for the bride and groom, to the kitchen, where the servants stick a swastika flag into the wedding cake and play “Here Comes the Bride” (Wagner, of course) on the phonograph.

Among friends, the wedding party, which includes members of the ratlines who got the Nazis out of Europe, speak German in front of the help, who only speak Spanish, and exult in the reminders of their glory days as the camera roams from outbuilding to mansion and room to room in one of Serebrennikov’s charismatic tracking shots.

For the most part, though, the filmmaking is restrained by the director’s standards, staying close on Mengele as he busts in and out of hiding, even returning to West Germany in the mid-1950s, where his wealthy family, taking stock of the prominence of former Nazis in postwar government and society, suggest he comes back. “No one cares,” he’s told, not even the Americans, but either through ego or guilt, he remains paranoid about potential consequences for his crimes, intuiting that Eichmann is being indiscreet even before his kidnapping by Mossad.

As the political regimes in South America become less favourable to former Nazis — the ouster of Perón in the 1950s is a turning point — his persecution complex sharpens as his body deteriorates. The film returns repeatedly to 1977, when a visit from the doctor’s estranged son Rolf brings forth undiminished invective against the Jews and raging rationalisations. Within the relatively slick and safe Roma-lite visual scheme, Diehl’s fulminations, about the forthcoming film of The Boys from Brazil or the hypocrisy of the postwar society that singles out him for depravity above and beyond other Nazis (“and they call me the angel of death!”), approach camp in their extremes of its deluded self-pity, without a mad mise en scène to match the Wagnerian performance.

In his two-hander with Rolf, Mengele hammers again and again at the acknowledged pathologies of the Nazi era, the nationalism and natalist race pseudoscience, a flagellating awareness of which is the paradoxical source of many of contemporary Germany’s most treasured moral certainties. When Rolf — who came to despise his father, but refused to reveal his whereabouts to Nazi hunters — finally gets Mengele to discuss Auschwitz, the film launches a centrepiece flashback, and switches from black and white to colour. Anyone wondering why the new film from Competition regular Serebrennikov has been shunted off to Cannes Premieres will figure out why at this specific moment, as the Auschwitz sequence opens with a shot of Nazis at leisure, picnicking by a river and frolicking in the long grass, with a blatant, unavoidable resemblance to the opening of Zone of Interest; the comparison does not flatter the newer film. Next to the fixed distance, ominous ambient sound design, and fearsomely chilly rigour of Glazer’s film, this is pat bucolic irony.

Serebrennikov strains to avoid the generic in depicting the death camp, reaching about halfway down his bag of tricks in filming it in the style of a Super 8 home movie, with Nazis including Mengele mugging for the camera in between assigning new arrivals to labour or death, taking relish in separating families and picking out special cases for medical experiments. Like a hack horror movie director, Mengele was particularly interested in twins and people with dwarfism and other physical deformities, and that’s duly emphasised here, as a performance by an orchestra of little people is intercut with the cruel examination, brutal execution, and grotesque dissection and disposal of a man with exaggerated kyphosis. In cheery subtitles (not, oddly, silent-movie intertitles; you’d expect a flourish like that) Mengele discusses the best way to separate tissue from bone, whether through chemicals, or boiling down bones like in a stew. The aim is for disgust and visceral shock, but it’s hard to find unclaimed aesthetic territory when depicting the Holocaust, and I’m frankly skeptical of the purpose being served here.

Shortly before Serebrennikov left Russia, in 2022, he traveled to Cannes to present his film Tchaikovsky’s Wife — a revisionist take on the national icon and closeted homosexual, which was insufficiently respectful of Russian culture according to the Russians, and insufficiently forthright in its condemnation of it according to (some) Westerners. He and his cast, especially those still living and working in Russia, were pained and self-censoring throughout the festival, foreshadowing Serebrennikov’s departure from his authoritarian native land for liberal Western Europe. But free speech has its limits in Germany, too, particularly on issues touching, as The Disappearance of Josef Mengele does, on Zionism. A polite guest in an artistic and political climate which is flamboyantly hostile to any criticism of Israel — which is something like the structuring absence of the film — Serebrennikov is circumspect on the subject.

Jewish “boys will grow into men” who want revenge on the Nazis, Mengele rages at one point — a justification for genocide which has some contemporary echoes. But this is an exception. Mengele also rants and raves about the influence of Israel, as you’d expect from a Nazi, and lives in fear of Mossad, with the eventual abduction, trial and execution of Eichmann hanging over him as a memento mori, as you’d also expect from a Nazi.

But in fact, after the hugely symbolic Eichmann trial, Mossad chose not to pursue Mengele despite possessing promising and, as it turned out, accurate intelligence on his whereabouts, focusing their efforts, instead, on Israel’s competition with its Arab neighbours. Meir Amit, head of Mossad in the early 1960s, specifically gave the directive to “stop chasing after ghosts from the past and devote all our manpower and resources to threats against the security of the state,” ie, Egypt’s missile program, and later Palestinian militants. The evidence suggests that Mossad in those years was not adverse to recruiting ex-Nazis to help with these aims.

The film, which includes one last Auschwitz flashback during Mengele’s death, at age 67, from drowning, posits the Jewish state, or the threat of it, as the avenging conscience of the six million. The film’s view of Israel is filtered through the awareness of its protagonist, which is hard to fault as a formal choice, hard to second-guess as a sketch of the flailing, haunted and hateful conscience of an evil man, and even hard to critique as portrait of at least one facet of a government which, with the Holocaust very much fresh in its mind, brought Eichmann to justice despite Argentina’s refusal to extradite him.

Yet this time last year, Serebrennikov was in Cannes with Limonov: The Ballad, a sprawling almost-musical that exulted in the defiant, incoherent, intermittently galvanic and ultimately vile ethos of the Russian literary gadfly and eventual nationalist militia founder Eddie Limonov, played with bilious insouciance by Ben Whishaw. A self-implicating portrait of artistic ego and the urge to provoke, which can lead equally down avant-garde and reactionary paths, the film looked at Limonov with mingled loathing and fascination, and had contradictory, confusing, risky things to say about the relationship of individuals to the state and its pieties.

One the one hand: yes, of course, the first thing Kirill Serebrennikov would do upon arrival in Germany is to make a movie about a Nazi. But on the other hand, in zeroing in on an oft-repeated narrative of national shame, he handles a characteristically inflammatory subject with uncharacteristic inoffensiveness, yielding limited insight.

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