Austerlitz

An adaptation of W. G. Sebald’s last novel and also an insightful essay on it, Austerlitz combines narrative forms to explore the novel’s interconnected themes—memory and architecture; vision, blindness, and history—and its many worlds: Brussels, Wales, Paris, Prague, Theresienstadt, and yes, Marienbad. Actor Denis Lavant appears as the eponymous protagonist, an architecture historian unbuilding his life brick by obstinate brick. Sebald peppered his novel with found photographs, inscrutable objects the film calls “worlds stolen, leaving a gap that only words can fill.” Austerlitz approaches cinematography in that way, too—not as description but as inherent mystery, a unique meeting of page and screen.