The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich| his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.。这是一个小人物发奋追梦的故事。福祥、蓝禄、捷寿,三人是劳工署之友,工作都肯做,偏偏就是什么工作都做不长。蓝禄要买到房子才能“抱得美人归”,福祥因为没钱被爱人抛弃、捷寿希望通过努力得到紫衣侠的垂青。三个人“捆绑上台”为爱出击,与美国专业摔角手展开一场搞笑对决。在爆笑中感受精神的鼓舞,三个臭皮匠的“糗”相百出的同时更给人以内心的感动。爱情在影片最后都得到了完美诠释,“福禄寿”三人通过不懈努力,终于跨越了父子“代沟”、有情人终成眷属,三人的友谊也更加稳固。。