Werner Schroeter | Der Rosenkönig (The Rose King) / 1986

a fire left burning

by Douglas Messerli

 

Magdalena Montezuma, Edgar Allan Poe, and Werner Schroeter (credited writers), Werner Schroeter (director) Der Rosenkönig (The Rose King) / 1986

 

Anyone who loves arthouse cinema will immediately recognize Werner Schroeter’s films, particularly his 1986 work Der Rosenkönig (The Rose King), as works with some of the most beautiful images ever screened. But “reading” his films, that is putting meaning to those images in the context of the movie’s limited moments of dialogue and lack of coherent narrative is another matter, evidenced perhaps by the paucity of reviews and essays that exist. There have been some well-written paragraphs in Film Comment, RoweReviews and elsewhere, and a short assessment in James Quandt’s excellent essays on Schroeter’s films in The New York Review of Books and ArtForum, but little else that might help an American neophyte interact with Schroeter’s great film, let alone place it in the context of the tradition of queer cinema.

     Part of the problem is simply in knowing how to watch Schroeter’s works. If you’re an admirer of narrative—as admittedly I am—you may have difficulty in adjusting your mind when approaching the German director’s pictures—and here “picture” is a truly appropriate word. For like the Georgian-born Armenian director Sergei Paradjanov and, occasionally, the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, Schroeter’s films are not focused on dialogue and normative plot structures but upon images presented in the form of emblems and/or tableaux that present their significance through visual images that are sometimes specific to the culture and at other times embrace symbols that might be internationally recognized in the Jungian sense.

     In Schroeter’s instance it is useful to know the legend of the Tausendjähriger Rosenstock, the “thousand-year rosebush” that grows from the Hildescheim cathedral. The legend behind it concerns Emperor Louis the Pious, son of Charlemagne, who in 815 was hunting in the Hercynian Forest for a white buck. He became separated from his hunting party and lost not only sight of the buck but his own horse. When his hunting-horn went unanswered he swam across the Innerste river and, disoriented, walked until he discovered a mound covered with a wild rose, symbol of the Saxon goddess Hulda. Praying over a reliquary containing relics of the Virgin Mary which he had brought with him, he meditated until falling asleep. Upon awakening the mound was covered with a glitter of white snow despite the summer bloom of the roses and green grasses and the leaf-covered trees. Hilda, associated with wilderness and winter, was thought by Louis as having “shaken her coat” upon the snow-covered mound, indicating that the Virgin should be venerated in the future instead of herself. The Emperor is said to have built the cathedral upon the rose-covered mound, whose flowers bloom still today.

     Also of ephemeral interest to The Rose King is the South Tyrolean legend of König Laurin, the king of a race of dwarves in the Dolomite mountains which they mined for jewels and ores. Laurin lived in an underground palace made of shining quartz, but his special joy was his great garden at the entrance to his crystal palace covered with roses with the most beautiful of scents. The King was so fearful of a single rose being plucked that he declared that anyone who dared to touch the roses or tore at the silken thread wound round the garden as a fence would have his left hand and right foot chopped off.

     When the King of the River Etsch one day determined to marry off his beautiful daughter Similde, he invited the neighboring nobleman, except for Laurin, to join him on a May Day ride. Hearing of the event, King Laurin put on his magic Cap of Invisibility and visited the gathering, immediately falling in love with the young girl, grabbing her up and escaping with her on horseback. Similde’s father immediately sent out his knights to rescue his daughter, but Laurin had little to fear, he felt, since his pursuers would never see him in his private gardens. But observing the roses at sway, the knights detected Laurin’s presence and trapped him. So angered was Laurin for the roses’ betrayal that he ordered that “Neither by day nor night might anyone ever glimpse his lovely sight again. Yet, having forgotten twilight, people can still see the pink glow in the sky (what the Germans call Alpenglow) at dusk and dawn.

     But the Greek and Roman legends are far more crucial to Schroeter’s work. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, if you recall, already associated with the white rose, heard from Ares’ own mouth that he was so jealous of Adonis, god of desire, that he had sent a wild boar to harm of him during a hunting trip. Hurrying to her lover’s aid, Aphrodite arrived too late, her tears pooling with his blood to create the rose.

     In the Roman myth, Venus’ (the Greek Aphrodite) son Cupid was stung by a bee when shooting arrows into a garden full of white roses. Walking in the garden, Venus later pricked her foot on a thorn left by her son’s arrows, turning the roses red.

    Obviously, it is roses that Anna (the wondrous Magdalena Montezuma) of Schroeter’s story grows, with her son, Albert (Mostefa Djadjam) serving as an obsessed horticulturalist who as his mother observes is more of a dreamer than a practical biologist like Gregor Mendel, who in his experiments with genetics, developed various hybrids of roses. Having moved her life and handsome young son from an exotic Arabian desert after her husband’s death to an ancient rural acreage and farmstead in Portugal where she has difficulty communicating with the locals, she and her son literally survive on roses, dining on a rose-colored gruel, red wine, and white loaves of bread.

     Anna seems frozen in her new environment, filled as it is by cobwebs, an entire bestiary of animals (spiders obviously, a cat, rat, lizard, and sheep), a group of almost feral children who comment on events a bit like a Greek chorus, and decaying religious icons left over from generations of previous owners. In this new environment Anna displays near operatic gestures— staring for long empty moments into space, scratching fingernails against walls, and etching letters into wet clay soil—of entrapment. When, late at night, she picks up a rifle to shoot it into her rose gardens we wonder whether she, like Cupid, is aiming at some invisible prey or, like King Laurin, warning away anyone who might dare to crush her blossoms. One late night, while walking in her garden, she spots an insect on one of her blossoms (a bee?) and attempts to remove it, evidently unsuccessfully, since she finally crushes the entire petals of one rose, the bushes themselves seeming to entwine her in their barbs, pricking this Venus of Portugal in revenge.

      As she tells us in a voice-over early in the film, now that her husband has died, her major attention has been converted to Albert, and she follows him with her stares wherever he goes, even leaning up again his bedroom wall as if she might hear him breathing or even his inner thoughts in the night. Albert, although clearly resentful of her attentions, seems to have discovered a new kind of freedom in this alien world. He too is protective of their roses and is almost vindictive when forced to bring his mother daily trimmings of rose stems for her vases throughout the house, yet he does spill petals a regular intervals, even stealing some of them to feed his newest “project,” as Quandt quite brilliantly describes it, for which he “nabs a hunky young local named Fernando (Antonio Orlando) pilfering from the alms box—a nod to Robert Bresson’s The Devil, Probably (1977), a film Fassbinder also admired—and incarcerates him in the barn, lovingly bathing his Saint Sebastian–like prisoner.” 

     Schroeter’s emblems and tableaux begin to be repeated: roses dripping with water, a fountain pouring fresh water from the spout of an ancient lizard-like stone figure, the ocean waves rolling across a male naked body, fireworks lighting up the sky, sun shimmering through the roof beams of the ancient barn, ropes with which Albert has bound his captive being carefully and almost ritualistically untied as the boy asks “Did I hurt you?”—all represent what we quickly realize is Albert’s gradual release from years of a closeted life tied to the neuroses of his mother, in order to completely immerse himself into the splendors of the male body. The horticulturalist’s previous attempts at grafting roses has suddenly found an entirely new focus, as he tells his mother, which begins with the capture of the beauty, continues in nights of dutiful and patient self-torture—during which Fernando, in near-ecstatic anticipation of the event prays to God that the boy will not have suffer over love much longer on his account—and ends by the grafting of Albert’s body onto that of his own, which we witness appropriately through the lens of the director’s camera primarily by the openings and entwinements of the stems of their bodies, legs, hands, and feet.

       Yet, somewhat as for Alfred Hitchcock’s Norman Bates, the mother remains too much with him in her dark ruminations, her unspoken fears, her financial worries, and most of all in her stifling love of her son with all her myths of shooting stars and the deaths of children who have kissed too early. As we hear a reader from Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Alone” reciting, referring clearly to Alfred: “From childhood’s hour I have not been / As others were.”      

     When Anna begins to realize what has happened, she orders Fernando to leave, handing him a wad of money, but he will not go. “Blood cannot nr washed with blood; blood can only be washed with water,” he observes. In one mad operatic still, she stands like a mad Madonna upon an alter, watching in mute awareness that if she wishes to save either Fernando or her son, she must absent herself from the observation of their coupling. Nonetheless she too remains, telling her son that she is about to sell the farm, the final stage of his emancipation.

        Hence her disquisition on the deep black interiors of the artist Georges de La Tour, against which the characters stand lit as upon a stage waiting to enter a world outside of the painting while carrying with them the darkness of their pasts. She paints the reproductions of his art entirely over with black, blackening out even parts of her own face (reminding one a bit like the blue paint with which Jean-Paul Belmondo covers his face in Pierre le Fou).        

     If Albert has lit a passionate emotional fire within, Fernando knows that a destructive surface blaze must surely result; stealing a few matches from the children, he lights some of the surrounding straw afire. Although Albert seems to come to his rescue, it is a mad attempt to restore the past as he takes a knife to his former captive’s arms and legs, attempting to graft rose stems into the soil of the human corpse. Carrying him into their garden, he lays down the body carefully alongside the other plants, Anna and he gently packing their mutant rosebush with moist dirt. In the background the barn is burning, the children arriving to observe its eventual collapse.

       Has the fire finally caught up with her, as she as always feared? Or can the two, mother and son, remain in their unholy bondage to await the slow flowering of their new variety of rose like the ancient thousand-year-flowering rosebush signifying the relic of Albert’s sexual awakening?  

      Both Magdalena Montezuma and her close friend Schroeter knew she was dying of cancer as she performed this role, she hoping she might die on the set in Portugal. She died 14 days after the final shot in Münich. The Rose King is dedicated to her.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (December 2020).

Małgorzata Szumowska | W imię... (In the Name Of) / 2013

a different notion of morality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Małgorzata Szumowska, Michal Englert, and Szczepan Twardoch (screenplay), Małgorzata Szumowska (director) W imię... (In the Name Of) / 2013

 

This Polish film of 2013 received mixed reviews, particularly from seemingly sympathetic commentators who couldn’t quite understand the perspective of the filmmaker Małgorzata Szumowska given the film’s equivocations of the central character’s gay characterization.

 

     Letterboxd commentator Michael Scott summarizes his questions about the film in this manner:

“In a remote Polish village, a middle aged priest struggles with his attraction to a young intellectually delayed farmhand while trying to pull a rabble of godless delinquents into line through the healing power of odd jobs and shirtless football.

     If I am being perfectly honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand director Malgorzata Szumowska's motivations for making In the Name Of. Generally films focusing on homosexuality in the church come at the theme with a very defined bent (pun intended) and make no bones about which side of the argument they fall. Szumowska and her co-writer Michal Englert (who

incidentally also worked as cinematographer here and on The Congress) seem to want to play the both sides but in continually jumping the fence they only end up impaling themselves.

     Chief amongst the issues is the treatment of the film's central character, hot Priest Adam, played by Andrzej Chyra. He's an upstanding man of the cloth and Szumowska and Englert go to great pains to stress not only his moral fortitude but also his disinterest in young boys, at least in the sexual sense. And yet, despite this, their camera spends the first hour languishing on the bodies of the boys of the parish, taking every opportunity to fetishise them, seemingly (and somewhat contradictorily) under the guise of presenting Father Adam's desire."

    Yes,  we do observe the often half-naked and even fully naked delinquent boys surrounding Priest Adam and his assistant teacher Michal (Łukasz Simlat), but the boys themselves, I would argue, highly aware of their allure and equally homophobic themselves attempt to challenge the Priest, particularly the new tough Blondi (Tomasz Schuchardt), who as a gay boy takes advantage of another sexually confused student among Adam’s not fully reformed boys, a young gay boy who seeks out the help of the priest, who cannot perhaps fully help him without admitting his own homosexual desires. The only advice that Adam can provide is that, as he himself does, he take long morning runs, obviously an ineffectual answer for a young boy in terror of discovery.

     Moreover, in this isolated backwater Polish world to which Adam has requested reassignment after a previous incident involving his sexuality, many highly religious community, including his teacher’s wife Ewa (Maja Ostaszewska), are desperate for affection and love; Ewa tries hard, without any success, to tempt the priest to take her into his bed.

     Even the Church heads realize that Adam is a good and caring priest, who has done wonders for the boys and served the community well as the local priest. And Adam, despite his desires, is definitely not, as he later makes clear, a pedophile.

     Adam is not fetishizing these boys, even if Szumowska’s camera does so purposely, to make us aware of their own realization of their sexual power and their sublimated attempts to challenge the priest whose sexuality they, like Ewa, challenge.

     Temptation comes instead from a local boy, a kind, hard-working, perhaps mentally challenged hunk named "Dynia" Lukasz (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz) whose entire family seem mentally deficient, but who himself is a loyal helper to Adam in his daily duties.

      The movie purposely does not throw its sympathy to Adam’s gay desires since the priest himself is desperately attempting to remain true to his priestly codes of abstinence.

    But because he is loving and protective of Dynia, the young adult himself becomes equally protective of his mentor, perhaps the only one in his life who has ever given him a second thought, let alone given him the opportunity and responsibility of helping others.

     Their relationship begins when Adam saves his life by retrieving him from a local river spot where the boys have gone swim, like the others Dynia diving in but without knowing how to swim. To save the boy’s life Adam must give him mouth to mouth resuscitation.

     Soon after, as the two back home, Dynia suddenly speeds off into a local cornfield, hiding until Adam enters it in search of him. The boy howls like an ape, Adam soon calling in kind, perhaps first as simply a joke, but soon realizing that it is a kind of mating cry, the two almost courting one another in the language of the beasts.

     Poland remains a cruelly homophobic world today; just visit the film the 2020 short work, Colorful Picture by Karol Chwierut if you need evidence. And when the reformatory boys whisper among themselves of the priest possibly being a faggot, Dynia rushes violently to his defense, himself being beaten by the cruel boys, and bringing him only closer to Adam, who nurses his beautiful charge who the boys, perhaps not so affectionately had named “Humpty” back to healthy, the boy curling up on the couch with his savior a bit like an animal hungry for attention and physical affection.

      In such a hot house of anger and desire, is it any wonder that the priest, try as hard as he can, grows more and more tempted. It is not only his sexual desires by his empathetic kindness that increasingly draws him to his “humpty” until he can no longer restrain himself, the stolid Catholic Mikal, who cannot even satisfy his wife, noticing them together in a parked car, perhaps not even having sex but simply holding on to one another in need of the human touch.

      Adam hurries off to the local religious superior in hope of confession, but the church has closed down for a weekend cleaning, and furthermore Mikal has already beaten him to the priest with a worried letter regarding Adam’s behavior.

      Adam attempts to discuss his condition with his sister living in Toronto via Skype, but she equally attempts to swat his feelings away. He tries to explain that the young boy he is charge hung himself because his father regularly beat him, that he wanted to hug him to protect him but didn’t dare bring himself to so; he wants to do good, he proclaims, but the love he has to offer is confused with desire both by the society around him and his own sexual needs. He tries to explain that he has again been called to the curia and will once more be transferred by the bishop. “How can I help it that I love these boys?” he asks. Her answer is simply “Stop talking rubbish.”

    He admits he “could fuck all of them,” while she responds that she not talk to him while he is drunk. He explains it in such simple terms, “I just wanted a hug,” that any sensitive person might comprehend, but even his pleas, his tears mean nothing to her, just as it is treated in his world in Poland; and she hangs up despite to attempts for a simple honest hearing or response.

      Even Mikal is sorry for his actions, as Adam once more packs up to leave for God knows where. Is there any place left?

       A short while later Dynia overhears fellow workers speaking of the priest who they suggest is now living just a few kilometers away. “Humpty” leaps way from his job and literally runs off, leaving his family behind, catching a train to the village named by the workers. He arrives in a rainstorm, Adam inviting him in, undressing him, and joyfully giving in to his long withheld sexual desires.

       If he is a failed priest, he is now a splendid human who can love and share with another being.

Many critics describe what he does as wrong; but I would argue it is precisely the right decision. We need more loving human beings and perhaps less priests in the world.  

       Yet the movie doesn’t stop here. It returns us, quite unpredictably, to Adam’s divinity school days in a long tracking shot of young priests, some walking forward until they and the camera reach the closest vantage point where we see a group of young men engaged in conversation. As they continue, one turns away whom we recognize as Adam, now facing the camera as the others remain engaged with one another.

      Another Letterboxd commentator, Richmond Hill, argues:

 

“To understand the film you could skip to the last two scenes which square the sex and then ruin things by circling back to the seminarian sour grapes and another Damien-style glance to camera as the whole sorry saga is implied to start again.”

      I find this statement to represent an utter misunderstanding of the work. Adam stares out of the past at us not as an evil Omen-like Damien, but as someone different from the others, someone who will finally be able to face up to his true responsibilities to live a full loving life. It appears that the critics would doom him to the narrow-minded world in which he has grown up.

     This is a profoundly moving and actually hopeful film that demonstrates holiness does not always reveal itself in a priest’s or minister’s garb.

      I might suggest that what critic Michaelle da Silva argues at the end of her review in Georgia Straight—“You might find yourself cheering for Adam and Lukasz to get together, which may ultimately cause you to question your own morals.”—does not truly comprehend, at least, my notion of morality.

 

Los Angeles, May 3, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2026).