In 2024 a Clip Viral, in which a street interview of leading Content Creator in New York, will meet Willem Dafoe of all people – and obviously has no idea who has just run in front of him. The Tikok star is completely unreliable to the international author cinema (“Antichrist”, “The Lighthouse”) as well as the blockbuster subject (“Spider-Man 1-3”) known and physiognomically actually unmistakable actors-who is what he is doing, where he will see in five years. Dafoe gets involved in the game, introduces himself to the first name, no, he actually doesn't worry about the future. In these situation -comic and remarkably vain 48 seconds, everything you need to know about your self -location.
Dafoe has been standing in front of the camera for 45 years, has almost tried almost everything, and nothing seems to be egoer than the question of whether anyone sees him as a star persona. Analogous to this, it is still insanely productive, at the same time his project election becomes increasingly eccentric. If he does not play small to tiny roles for friendly directors such as Wes Anderson (“Asteroid City”) or Yorgos Lanthimos (“Kinds of Kindness”), Dafoe likes to work with largely unknown author filmmakers on projects that are almost impossible that they find an audience outside of festivals, but they are closed to their presence. Films like “The Birthday Party” (by Miguel Ángel Jiménez), “Late Fame” (by Kent Jones) or “The Souffleur” by the Argentine director Gastón Solnicki. The filmmakers benefit from his names, while Dafoe is granted an experiment space freed from established rules for his spectacle.
Lucius Gloss (Willem Dafoe) is changing through the corridors of the Vienna Intercontinental – but soon the hotel manager will lose his post.
In “The Souffleur”, Dafoe embodies the hotel manager Lucius Glanz, who – that at the beginning he reveals the Hotel Intercontinental, between the city park and the concert hall in Vienna for two years now. Like the title -giving soufleur in the theater, he directs the fortunes of the house in the background, calms guests who do not come to their room in time, maintains the quality and smooth processes in all areas. The traditional luxury guest house, but also gradually dilapidated, is not only a job for him, but also a home in which he lives together with his daughter Lilly (Lilly Lindner).
But it is precisely this home that is now threatened, because shortly the rich Argentinier Facundo Ordoñez (director Solnicki himself) will take over the Intercontinental as the new owner – and shine will lose his position that is identical to him. So the title has another level of meaning: because suddenly misleading soufflés, who were still mutually accumulating, play a role that serve as an overwriting metaphor for the decline of the hotel and thus connected an old order …
Frustrating fragments
“The Souffleur” is not nearly as straightforward as the table of contents has just read. No wonder: Solnicki has made a name for himself at festivals with fragmented, often at the interface between staged and documentary moving narrative methods (he already devoted himself to the Viennese coffee houses in 2022). And his most recent film is deliberately vague. He is not concerned with the question of whether the hotel is still saved and his protagonist can keep his job and life. Instead, he undertakes a fragmentary foray through the past and the presence of a city and a house that actually existed in the heart of Vienna, but fictionalized for the film.
Archive material in black and white from the construction of the hotel, the ice rink close to the hotel or overcrowded dining rooms (we see them so fully in the cinematic presence) Solnicki contrasts the repetitive tours through the halls and rooms of the hotel. He also shows street recordings from the Vienna of the here and now, visits the grave of the avant-garde composer György Ligeti at the central cemetery or a giraffe in the zoo for a short moment. In between, employees of the camera are presented to the camera, and every now and then we hear atonal piano music enclosed with vinyl cracks. Solnicki places these levels and pictures side by side, but does not strive for a cinematic entanglement. Much – for example also the interactions between Lucius and his self -injurating daughter Lilly – remains in the room without reluctantly working in the hotel, without “The Souffleur” ever coming back on it.
Lucius' daughter Lilly (Lilly Lindner, left) also has her center of life in the Hotel Intercontinental. But does she want that in contrast to her father?
Solnicki is committed to the experimental cinema, but even from this point of view, “The Souffleur” is a deeply frustrating visual experience. His motifs remain arbitrary, and the refusal of the director to put them in a relationship prevent a rhythm until the end. Maybe these pictures have something to do with each other, maybe not, and it may not be the job of the film to give us a key – but “The Souffleur” has no incentives to be interested in such questions.
The surprising last appearance of the German independent director, Klaus Lemke (“Rocker”), who died in 2022, and of course the pure presence of the always charismatic, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes wrongly improvising Dafoe, who throws at a hotel room party chips into the mouth of the guests, at a conference of the city administration in Italian over alpacas or lectured by desperate Sobbing almost seamlessly overlides into a crazy laugh. But even the most beautiful eccentricities are not yet making a film.
Conclusion: Willem Dafoe obviously enjoys what he is doing-but also “The Souffleur” serves a rather frustrating variety of experimental cinema, whose loose consequences do not seem associative, but at any reason.
We saw “The Souffleur” at the Venice Film Festival 2025, where he celebrated its world premiere as an opening film in the Orizzonti series.