Coup De Grace Prices

Set in Russia in 1919, shortly after the fall of the Czar, this allegorical love story tells the tale of an affair against the backdrop of a civil war. Magarethe von Trotta stars as a young woman who becomes involved with a sexually repressed Prussian soldier. When the soldier refuses her, the woman spirals into a psychosexual depression and begins sleeping with numerous men and championing the cause of the revolutionaries.Volker Schlondorff (THE TIN DRUM) directed this 1976 feature ripe with sexuality, the brutality of war, and even witchcraft. The ending of this heartbreaking work is unforgettable and unrelenting.

Passion and politics collide with tragically bleak results in Le Coup de Grace. Dedicating his film to French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Melville, director Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum) emulates Melville's fascination with themes of war, adapting (with his wife and star, Margarethe von Trotta) the novel Der Fangschuß by Marguerite Yourcenar, set in Latvia in 1919 after the end of World War I. While sporadic fighting continues in the Baltic states, naive countess Sophie (von Trotta) seals her fate by falling in love with Erich (Matthias Habich), a Prussian soldier who secretly desires Sophie's brother (in one of several vaguely handled subplots). She retaliates by supporting the Communists and, when captured, demands that Erich be her executioner. Like the repressed emotions of its characters, the drama's power is nearly subdued by Schlondorff's murky ambiguity; it helps to be familiar with the film's historical context, but Le Coup de Grace is still a worthy companion to Schlöndorff's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, and a hauntingly atmospheric tale of wartime self-destruction. --Jeff Shannon