Dhe child is ill. Didn’t eat enough, worked until he dropped. Now it lies in bed and, for lack of media distraction, thinks about dying. “Are you afraid of death?” eight-year-old Franz asks his father quietly. “Well,” he says (we are in Pinzgau in 1927). “Yeah,” says the child. The father, played by a lovingly scratched Karl Markovics, explains to his youngest: “It’s not so bad with death.” If you do it cleverly, you can negotiate with him. As evidence, he tells a story.
But in the limited world of a pious farmer’s family with many children, there seem to be worse things than death anyway. The eternal struggle of surviving, for example. Or the wound of a breakup. Little Franz, played with innocent thoughtfulness by Maximilian Reinwald, will soon find out. The fact that his father, at the end of this densely staged first chapter, writes him over to a rich farmer as a farmhand out of necessity, is the pain from which “The Fox” learns its impetus and its depth.
In the economic rhythm of this film, childhood shrinks into what it may have been for many of that generation: a brief, dreary chapter. Accordingly, the film jumps abruptly to the year 1937. Franz is of legal age, no longer a servant and can be recruited as a soldier for the federal army. Again a contractual affiliation binds him, again it is done so as not to starve. In the transport vehicle, the excited comrades quickly fraternize, Franz remains the silent observer on the sidelines. Neither hero nor follower, Simon Morzé embodies this dutiful, yet only half-committed presence through minimal hands-on gestures. Drink a little here, sing along a few bars there. Don’t talk much. Ideological disputes play no role, Franz picks up the sentences and behavior of his comrades and superiors more like weather events, with equanimity and vigilance.
At some point Franz wears the Wehrmacht uniform, the troops invade France. All major events, however, remain small and limited in this film. Only then can the encounter with the eponymous fox become something big, a moment almost reminiscent of Terrence Malick, without this having to be exhibited through music, false whine synchronization or cuteness penetrance.
Almost like in a fairy tale
In a fit of rage, Franz leaves his comrades’ table, thrashes a tree in the nearby forest, and suddenly Yoshi Heimrath’s camera, which never presses, but always carefully scans Franz’ narrow world, moves up the entire trunk of the tree. As if it were an indication of something greater that silences all human squeals and hesitations.
Almost like in a fairy tale, where trees give good gifts to desperate human children, Franz finds an injured fox cub next to this tree, which is holding out next to its mother, who is dead in the iron trap. The soldier takes the animal with him and secretly nurses it back to health in the midst of his troops. Even in the chaos of an attack or when his comrades are treated to alcohol and sex to cheer them up, Franz looks for the connection to his animal as if it were everything to him. When it has fled from the noise and he has finally found it again, he speaks quietly to it and to himself: “You were scared. You’re running away. Me too.” The fox becomes the saving side path of overstrained attention, the guarantor of a sense of belonging that is not based on obedience or duty.
The whole Saint-Exupéry fuss with taming, yes, you can think of that as an addition. But Goiginger doesn’t even try to outdo the simply fantastic story of the “Little Prince”. His “fox” never loses traction. There is a love story though. Franz gets to know a young French farmer’s wife (Adriane Grzadziel), who soon trusts the quiet man, and then the picture revels in soft spring colors, the soundtrack indulges in a happy frenzy in three-four time. When the woman realizes that she is in competition with the “Fixerl”, she makes it clear to Franz: the fox belongs in the wild, they, as a couple, in the house. Franz will decide.
The fox or I: Franz Streitberger (Simon Morzé) falls in love with a French farmer in the rear of the front
Those: © 2023 Alamodefilm
Already in his debut “The Best of All Worlds” (2017) about his own drug-addicted mother, the then only 26-year-old Austrian Adrian Goiginger knew how to draw a childlike character – his alter ego – as an observer of social imbalances, who himself was still in the devastated experienced in the context of trust. But his very first film idea, when he was 14, was “The Fox”, explains the director: his otherwise taciturn great-grandfather told him the story of his “fixerl”. He had the animal with him for months on trips as a motorcycle courier during the Second World War. Long before Goiginger’s debut and even before his hermit drama “Märzengrund” based on Felix Mitterer, there was this quiet story of an outsider and his furry companion.
The credits show a black-and-white photo of the young soldier Franz Streitberger, accompanied by the voice of the old man that the great-grandson once listened to so closely. His “fixerl”, he says, “is entirely my gwen”. Here, ownership does not mean availability, as peasant children once belonged to their parents, or later to those with whom they had to hire themselves out, or finally, as soldiers, to the state. “All mine” means belonging based on trust. The Fox is the story of such a gentle appropriation.
Incidentally, the director himself does not see “The Fox” as a war film, it is only set during the Second World War. Nevertheless, he conveys a rarely seen image of those sensitive non-heroes, those overlooked and unspectacular, who were and are plenty in every war. While Franz’ comrades, such as the initially enthusiastic Anton (Marko Kerezovic), die out emotionally at a dramatic pace, Franz carries on and doesn’t seem to change. To do as he is commanded: that is the law he has known since childhood, and by which he obeys, dispassionately.
Even if “The Fox” can’t keep up with Edward Berger’s Oscar-winning “Nothing New in the West” in terms of budget, Goiginger’s current film compares to his debut “The Best of All Worlds” like Berger’s “Nothing New in the West” to his debut ” Jack” (2014): Two great directors revealed their mastery early on by telling drama from a child’s perspective like few. Both works draw a psychological line from being a child to being a soldier, without apologizing or relativizing anything. The fox becomes the medium through which the pain and guilt of the fathers can be understood.