The subtitle of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet’s first feature, from 1965, “Only Violence Helps Where Violence Reigns,” suggests the fierce political program evoked by their rigorous aesthetic. The pretext of the film, set in Cologne, is Heinrich Böll’s novel “Billiards at Half Past Nine,” which they strip down to a handful of stark events and film with a confrontational angularity akin to Bartók’s music that adorns the soundtrack. The subtlest of cues accompany the story’s complex flashbacks. The middle-aged Robert Fähmel tells a young hotel bellhop of persecutions under the Third Reich| his elderly father, Heinrich, an architect famed for a local abbey, recalls the militarism of the First World War, when his wife, Johanna, incurred trouble for insulting the Kaiser. A third-generation Fähmel is considering architecture, just as the exiled brother of Robert’s late wife, returns, only to be met by their former torturer, now a West German official taking part in a celebratory parade of war veterans. Straub and Huillet make the layers of history live in the present tense, which they judge severely. The tamped-down acting and the spare, tense visual rhetoric suggest a state of moral crisis as well as the response—as much in style as in substance—that it demands.。電影由四段故事組成,熱戀的情侶領養了一隻貓叫小愛,分手後小愛該何去何從?第二隻是浪浪小福。與家人分隔兩地又失業的男子遇到小福,從此成為彼此的依靠。第三隻是名為秀妍的貓,獨生女秀晶的朋友們都有養寵物,孤單的她每天回到空蕩蕩的家中,媽媽卻說家裡不能養貓…。第四隻是順子的故事,患有老年痴呆症的爺爺,一點都不歡迎家中的不速之客,但門外不絕於耳的輕聲呼喊,我的順子回來了…。。