Unjust death has no angels

Like a chameleon, Mengele, the 'Angel of Death' of Auschwitz, slipped from the skin of Josef in Germany into that of Gregor, Peter, Pedro in various Latin American states, ending up buried in São Paulo as Wolfgang, unpunished for his crimes. Fleeing with a false passport from Switzerland to Argentina and then on to Paraguay and Brazil, he stubbornly retained within his various rinds an indefatigable faith in Nazism, along with the conviction that he had loyally served his country, ultimately being betrayed by his people. Kirill Serebrennikov followed him from Buenos Aires in 1956, from which he had to flee after the deposition of President Perón, who was protecting him together with a group of South American families nostalgic for the Third Reich.

In elegant black and white - as was said to be the manner of the doctor who decided with a glance who was destined for the gas chambers, who for labour and who for his eugenics experiments -, the Russian director adapts French journalist and writer Olivier Guez's investigative book, The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, from which the film takes its title. Serebrennikov has a confident, highly original and experimental directing style: he knows how to frame a man in a bare room from a dingy corridor, rendering the idea of the claustrophobia of the mind and the desolation of the soul in homage to the most neorealist, and at the same time - in an oxymoron that does not clash - to the most psychological of films. At the same time, it investigates the body, the object of the Nazi doctor's studies, with close-ups and close-ups, with a shoulder-mounted camera, then freeing itself in long shots in the interiors.

Serebrennikov follows Mengele's sick subjectivity, gets as close as possible to his cannibalistic gaze, but does not burn himself. As, on the other hand, he did in the previous Limonov, in which he privileged the myth of the Russian poet, writer, butler and extremist politician's brilliant fragility. There, in his search for the darker side of the human soul, he was subjugated by the histrionic, self-effacing character, who dangled from left to right. And he kept silent - making a beautiful film morally unacceptable - Limonov's connivance with war criminals Radovan Karadžić and Arkan, zealous promoters and perpetrators of the Srebrenica massacre. He gave his punk and theatrical soul to that film, inventing rock solutions and camera movements with fourth-part breaks. As had already happened in the musical and wonderful Leto, Summer (now on Mubi), on the Russian music scene of the 1980s with the first attempts at Glasnost.

It may be that Serebrennikov recognised himself in that adversarial soul, with whom he shared a declared homosexuality (although Limonov said he was bisexual) and opposition to the Putin regime for his support of the LGBTQ+ cause and Pussy Riot. The director paid for that exposure with imprisonment, house arrest and, finally, a substantial fine in response to charges of a self-styled misappropriation of public funds.

The admiration that shines through in Limonov is not there in The Disappearance of Josef Mengele, where August Diehl, who plays him, shows a cleanliness-obsessed, rabid, alcoholic being, not because he is tormented by remorse, but because he is terrified of Mossad and international justice, incredulous of being stripped of the respectability due him for his services to the Third Reich. Diehl, whose skill as an actor has already taken him to the vestiges of Nazism - he was Major Dieter Hellstrom in Tarantino's Gloryless Basterds and the war-denying peasant in Terrence Malick's The Hidden Life - is at once irascible, as Mengele was in reality, racist and misogynist. Every now and then the past overwhelms him: when his thoughts return to his first wife Irène (Dana Herfurth) and his second marriage to his brother's widow, Martha (Friederike Becht) in a ceremony evoked by a long sequence shot.