Eismayer *** (2022, Gerhard Liebmann, Luka Dimic, Julia Koschitz) – Classic Movie Review 12,487 

Gerhard Liebmann stars in the 2022 Austrian drama film Eismayer as Sergeant Major Eismayer, the toughest trainer in the Austrian Army. He lives gloomily with his gloomy wife and nice small son, but has a secret life as a gay man.

Gerhard Liebmann stars in writer-director David Wagner’s 2022 Austrian drama film Eismayer as Sergeant Major Eismayer, the toughest, most feared training officer in the Austrian Armed Forces, an old-school macho man and a scary dinosaur from the Eighties or Nineties.

He lives gloomily with his gloomy wife and nice small son, but also has a secret life as a gay man, and despite the ultra-macho exterior, is a struggling closeted homosexual. But then he has to train up a new bunch of recruits, and he suddenly falls in love with his young, openly gay immigrant soldier recruit Mario Falak (Luka Dimic), and his world is turned upside down.

After some homophobia and a scuffle in the showers, Falak is brave enough to come out to his army buddies, and, weirdly enough, they mostly accept him. They also accept their treatment by macho man Eismayer, but that’s perhaps another story.

Eismayer tells his wife he prefers men, and she promptly moves out with the kid. That leaves Eismayer home alone, and he can get Falak to stay the night by getting him over to use his electrician skills to fix his TV. Instead Eismayer makes a dinner date for the duo. Surprisingly, Falak seems unsurprised.

This convincingly acted, decently crafted and, eventually, surprisingly charming Austrian film is a sweet true love story with a very positive happy ending! It starts harshly like a version of The Sergeant and moves on to a human, warm-hearted place. Liebmann does it very well, and Dimic is ideal.

All that is great and winning. But the film has problems. The main problem is that it is a lightweight look for such a heavyweight subject, with too many details missing and too fast-moving a pace for full understanding. Eismayer isn’t a very nice character as presented here. so the obvious question is what does Falak see in him. He looks up to him, and admires him, then maybe pities him, but why does he love him? Towards the end, there’s one of the best scenes in the film when Eismayer shows tenderness towards his son, who asks him for the truth. It’s the film’s key scene, and it’s done beautifully.

More running time, an extra half hour, would help enormously here, with more scenes, more story, more explanations, and more clarity. It runs only 87 minutes and has a lot of story to tell. There’s a weird pacing problem: the story’s running too fast. Of course that means there’s no time to get even a little bit bored, or perhaps dash out for a cup of tea. Eismayer is a rush of a story.

If all you know about it in advance is that it’s a macho Sergeant Major falling for a handsome recruit, the film will take you completely by surprise, hopefully in a good way. Films like The Sergeant (1968) or Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) perhaps meant well but were reflections of an old ghastly era that Eismayer wants to put to rest, and in some ways helps to do.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,487 

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