Egon Schiele Exzess und Bestrafung, also
known as Egon Schiele Excess and Punishment
(English) and Egon Schiele, enfer et passion
(French) is a 1980 film based on the life of
the Austrian artist Egon Schiele. It stars
Mathieu Carriere as Schiele with Jane Birkin
as his artist muse Wally and Christine
Kaufman as his wife Edith and Christina Van
Eyck as her sister. The film is essentially
a depiction of obsession and its
constituents of sex, alcohol and
uncontrolled emotions.Set in Austria during
the Great War, Schiele is depicted as the
agent of social change leading to
destruction of those he loves and ultimately
of himself.
The final years of the short life of Egon
Schiele, the Austrian expressionist painter
are chronicled against the backdrop of the
final years of the Habsburg rule. The story
begins around 1912 as Schiele (Mathieu
Carriere) and his mistress and artistic muse
Wally (Jane Birkin) are befriended by an
obsessed teenage girl (Nina Fallenstein) who
has run away to be with Schiele.
Subsequently Schiele is imprisoned on the
grounds that he has behaved in a sexually
improper way towards the young woman.The
young women falsely accuses Schiele and
although he denies the charge he is
imprisoned. The girl withdraws her
accusations but Schiele is requested to
leave the area as he has offended the social
mores of the conservative society in which
he was living. Those offended include his
mother (Angelika Hauff) who rails against
his lax morals.
On his release his excesses continue
although he fights (literally) to conform
even volunteering to serve in the Austrian
army in the Great War. As a soldier Schiele
cuts a pathetic figure and he is quickly
removed as unsuitable. He disposes of his
alcoholic mistress and has an affair with a
society beauty who ultimately abandons him
as she can not cope with his sexual
obsessions. Schiele''s emotional cruelty is
exposed as he shuns Wally as she nears
death.Their parting scene at a Vienna social
gathering reveals a corruption and cruelty
that is at the heart of Schiele''s artistic
soul.
Schiele''s paintings however develop greater
depths as he pushes his body and emotions to
their limit. Whilst his paintings are
gaining acceptance (and many now hang in the
Leopold Museum in Vienna) his own sanity
suffers. He marries and appears to find a
modicum of contentment until his wife Edith
(Christine Kaufman) dies in the 1918 Spanish
Influenza pandemic. Schiele makes love to
his dying wife in a scene that is tender yet
shocking, evoking a central theme of Schiele''s
work: a link between sex and death.
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