Diplomacy

Diplomacy (Diplomatie, 2014) is a wartime chamber drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Volker Schlöndorff — the German filmmaker who took the Palme d'Or at Cannes for The Tin Drum. The setting is a single hotel room in Paris, the night of 24–25 August 1944. General Dietrich von Choltitz has his orders: detonate the explosives already planted under the city's bridges and monuments. Hitler is waiting for confirmation.

Swedish consul Raoul Nordling gets into the room through a hidden passage and starts talking. He has a few hours, no leverage, and one argument to make. André Dussollier plays Nordling as a man deploying every tool available — reason, flattery, memory, shame — while Niels Arestrup's von Choltitz resists with the discipline of a career soldier who has never yet refused a direct command. The film adapts Cyril Gély's play and leans entirely on this two-man confrontation.

Schlöndorff strips away everything that usually carries a war film — armies, explosions, wide landscapes — and what's left is more tense for it. Eighty-five minutes, one room, the fate of a city. Stream Diplomacy (2014) online on iFILM.