Writer and Director: Adrian Goiginger
The Fox released in time for the watchAUT Austrian Film Festival, is a heart-breakingly beautiful film about a young man in the Second World War. A soldier in the Austrian army, Franz Streitberger comes across a wounded fox cub in the forest, yelping helplessly beside the body of its dead mother. Franz smuggles the cub back into camp to mend its damaged paw. As the creature immediately adopts him, purring like a kitten, Franz can’t bear to part with it. For the next few months the fox becomes the closest the lonely Franz comes to having a real companion When he is sent to northern France as a motorcycle courier, he manages to bring the cub with him, hidden in his dispatch box.
It might seem an incredibly unlikely story, but it’s not. It’s what actually happened to the great-grandfather of the film’s writer and director, Adrian Goiginger. And Goiginger tells the story with great poignancy but without sentimentality, exploring what it means to lose your family and home. Goiginger’s script is admirably economical, the cinematography by Yoshi Heimrath and Paul Sprinz is superb and the original music by Arash Safaian complements the other elements with its sweet melancholy.
Goiginger takes time to let scenes breathe. In the extended opening we watch Franz as a barefoot child, the youngest of a large, desperately poor family in the Austrian alps. The parents seem harsh to the little boy, giving him the smallest helping potatoes when the family huddle round the fire for supper. But when Franz falls ill, his father sits by his bedside, comforting the boy’s fear of death with a folk tale about a farmer who successfully bargained with death for extra life.
Horrifyingly, the father signs away custody of Franz to a farmer, who hauls the screaming child away to become an apprentice. When we next see Franz, it’s 1937 and he has just been released from a decade of servitude. He has had no contact with his family – although he can now read and write, they remain illiterate. Signing up to the army with the promise of regular food and pay seems the obvious step. But Franz is almost mute after years of neglect. Fellow soldiers mock him when they catch him pocketing left-over food: “We’re a family – we share everything. Do you even know what a family is?” Goiginger doesn’t have to underline the unthinking cruelty of the words.
Franz’s deep loneliness makes his relationship with the playful cub all the more touching. There is a lovely scene of them playing together in a spring wood. And we regularly see Franz carrying the fox around, buttoned into his uniform jacket. Simon Morzé is superb as Franz, able often wordlessly to express a range of emotions. When he meets Marie, a young French woman, sympathetically played by Adriane Gradziel, their attempts to communicate are touching but are ultimately doomed to failure. Franz cannot explain even to himself the deep-rooted fear underlies his abrupt switches from gentleness to fury.
There is inevitably a heart-rending parting from the fox, but the creature’s unconditional devotion has allowed Franz to make his first tentative steps towards recovery.
The Fox is screening at watchAUT Austrian Film Festival from 23-26 March 2023 at Ciné Lumière, London.
