“The Last Days of Immanuel Kant,” a Physical Comedy of the Philosophical Life

Richard Brody at The New Yorker:

For that matter, Kant’s rigorous discipline turns out to be contagious. Though he was unmarried, he didn’t live alone—he had a household and spent much time interacting with his friend and unofficial majordomo Wasianski (played by André Wilms) and the manservant Lampe (Roland Amstutz)—and much of the movie’s action is centered on Kant’s obsessional domestic routine and the petty agonies of its perturbations. (The script, by Collin and André Scala, is loosely based on the memoirs of the real-life Wasianski, as retold by Thomas De Quincey.) Each morning, Lampe awakens Kant with the same phrase (“Herr Professor, it’s time!”)—and undoes the cord leading from the bed to the doorknob in case the philosopher should awaken during the night and need to get out in the dark. He serves Kant a pot of coffee with a similarly fixed motto (“Herr Professor, here is the coffee!”) and—after the philosopher takes three quick slugs of it with the same three brusque gestures—hands him his pipe for a smoke and, soon thereafter, the newspaper. When the coffee is delayed, Kant vents his anger with derisive twists of metaphysical irony regarding deferred happiness and the comforts of death.

more here.