One of those Werner Herzog films i saw back in my early 20’s. Oddly compelling at the time.
Not now though. Odd yes, but not especially compelling.
Bruno S – who plays Stroszek - is odd bordering on idiot; he declaims his lines in a faux oratory style as if he’s acting being an actor .There’s no appropriate feeling going on to match whats being said. A simpleton sort of soul, vaguely sympathetic, but also strangely alienating. His personal peculiarities belonging somewhere along the Autistic spectrum, left of Aspergers. After a while i found his blank idiocy disingenuously disengaging.
Disingenuously disengaging is how i found the rest of the film too.
Apparently Ian Curtis - of Joy Division – watched this the night he hung himself. I suppose if you were feeling especially alienated this film would speak to you, alienate you even better.
The scenes at the end; of the truck automatically circuiting round and round, the automated dancing chicken spinning itself madlessly about on its dish, Bruno S swung up high and helpless on the ski lift….these scenes disturbingly stick with you, like images from a bad dream you had, and don’t care too much to remember.
Herzog peoples this film with misfit eccentrics and their eccentricities (like he does in most of his films) losers living as outsiders, not fitting into the “norm”, not fit for the norm – even though they appear to have naive hope in US style normality, materialistic aspirations. You know they’re never gonna fit in, are doomed to be defeated by their automated failure-lifes. Just as alienated and automated as those dancing chickens really.
I don’t know about Werner Herzog. I suppose back in the 70’s he seemed like a mad mystic visionary. And then you get to hear how dull he is interviewed, like a softly spoken, mild-mannered NHS line-manager. And the films he’s made in the last 20 years or so seem stripped of that cult like allure.
Maybe its because we have access to so much film these days, via Dvds, the Internet, etc; we’ve got so much to see – so the tolerance level for stuff that looks willfully obscure, cerebral, or “difficult” is much lower. Well, it is with me. I’m just not prepared to put up with the Herzogs, Wenders, and Godards of this world boring me to death with their pet abstractions and obsessions.
And maybe i don’t need or want to watch films that don’t inspire me, don’t charm me, don’t move me; films – like this one is – that make life feel negatively displaced, estranged, futile.
Maybe i’ve just grown-up, got older, matured. I know better now the kind of films i “really” like to see, rather than the films i ought to be admiring.
Dir: Werner Herzog, Germany
5/10
