It’s a commedia with a single joke, though that joke becomes larger and more consequential at every stage: To escape detection - and certain death - the young Herold must not just pretend to be a captain, he must also exercise dominance over anyone liable to discover his secret. That’s when another lone private, Freytag (Milan Peschel), spies him from afar and assumes that he’s the real thing. After donning the captain’s heavy overcoat to stay warm, Herold begins to clown around, taking both sides of a dialogue between his own meek self and an imperious Nazi officer. One such deserter, a barefaced young private named “Willi” Herold (Max Hubacher), has scarcely escaped death at the hands of a vindictive German patrol when he comes upon an abandoned jeep and a suitcase containing the uniform of a Luftwaffe Hauptmann - a captain. But it was an insane time: April 1945, months from the end of World War II, when exhausted German soldiers deserted the collapsing front in huge numbers. That it’s true adds another insanity-inducing element. It’s too bleak to laugh at and too absurd to cry over. The Captain has the structure of a classic mistaken-identity farce and the tone of a serial-killer film.
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