Switzerland’s strange postwar burden of quasi-collaborator-guilt, with all its symptoms of evasion and denial, is the theme of this intimately presented black-and-white movie from writer-director Laurent Nègre. It is inspired by the real-life case of Hans Frölicher, the Swiss ambassador to Nazi Germany from 1938 to the end of the war, much approved of by the Nazi elite due to his submissive pro-German loyalty. It is also a free adaptation of The Envoy, Thomas Hürlimann’s stage-play on the same subject.
Michael Neuenschwander plays the ambassador, here fictionalised as Heinrich Zwygart; he returns to Switzerland and his handsome family estate in 1945, a haggard and haunted figure with a drink problem, yet outwardly fiercely correct as befits a Swiss public figure and civil servant. Sensing that he might be made the scapegoat for Switzerland’s embarrassment, he has a new plan to prove his enduring patriotism by being as sycophantic to the Americans as he was to the Germans.
As for his fellow Swiss, Zwygart finds them blandly relieved that their picturesque cuckoo-clock paradise of neutrality is unscathed. Zwygart’s cantankerous old-soldier father (Peter Wyssbrod) still stoutly proclaims the fiction that Hitler was deterred from invading Switzerland after the fall of France because of the swift mobilisation and continuous battle-readiness of the Swiss army. Zwygart is not-so-secretly contemptuous of Switzerland’s “toy soldiers” and has another theory: Hitler stayed out of Switzerland because Switzerland became the Germans’ discreet banker, the concierge state which facilitated cheap or gratis loans to aid the Nazi war effort, and was a useful financial friend to the party from well before the war.
Zwygart was at the centre of this, and conspicuously declined to plead for a pardon in the case of Maurice Bavaud, a Swiss student who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1938 and was executed; also a real case. But now Zwygart has hallucinatory visions of this would-be killer, the one Swiss who really was on the right side of history. This is a watchable, if somewhat stagey film, and these jump-scare visions, leaping out of the ambassador’s tormented subconscious, might have worked better in the theatre.
• A Forgotten Man is released on 10 November in UK cinemas.
