在一个远离喧嚣闹事的田园所在，双胞胎卢卡斯（卢卡斯·施-瓦兹 Lukas Schwarz 饰）和伊莱亚斯（伊莱亚斯·施-瓦兹 Elias Schwarz 饰）过着无忧无虑的生活，同时每天等待住院的妈妈早日归来。这一天，两个小家伙一身泥泞跑回家中，惊喜地发现妈妈（苏珊娜·伍艾斯特 Susanne Wuest 饰）终于回来了。只不过妈妈头上缠着绷带，几乎看不清原来的模样。只不过接下来的一段时间，孩子们发现妈妈态度变得冷淡，言行举止也有许多怪异的地方，他们甚至认为这并非真正的妈妈。母子间的冲突不断加剧，妈妈禁止伊莱亚斯和哥哥卢卡斯说话，男孩为此痛苦不堪。 究竟是什么让这个家走向破败边缘？究竟是哪里出了问题？

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.

在这部嬉笑怒骂的历史修正主义动画里，挥舞着链锯的乔治·华盛顿集结了一批惹事生非者，包括热爱啤酒的塞缪尔·亚当斯、知名科学家托马斯·爱迪生、优秀马术师保罗·列维尔和暴躁老哥杰罗尼莫等，想要在美国独立革命中击败本尼迪克特·阿诺德和詹姆斯国王。谁会笑到最后？没人知道。只有一件事能确定：他们可不是你印象中的国父。