What makes a “gute mensch”? Not Klaus Kinski. He’s qualifies as the original mad mensch No 1.
In this film he plays simpleton soldier “Woyzeck” going crazeee with insane jealousy that his young wife is messing about with an officer. And he’s also the subject of some kind of scientific research project being conducted by a creepy Doc involving eating peas for 3 months.
Kinski crackles with forebodings, demented intents: “Woyzeck, you’re running through creation like an open razor” says creepy Doc. Klaus is doing that knuckle cracking beloved of scary people.
His pretty wife Marie is gonna get slapped if she carries on flirting with that officer: “You stinkt fit to smoke the angels out of heaven” Woyzeck says to her. Kinski has a way of saying “stinkt” that makes you smell the word with disgust.
Nobody in this film talks normal; it’s all aphoristic riddles : “A man is an abyss….you get dizzy looking in” says Woyzeck. Kinski is falling into his abyss… gonna go proper mad now; he’s gonna buy a very sharp knife – then he’s gonna stick it in the hot harlot. The wind has been telling him to do it.
He – Woyzeck or is it Kinski?! – walks wife off into a field, and stabs her bloodly to death. In slow-mo. Drives the knife in – 7, 8 times. Kinski is just the man to do a bloody stabbing. He’s got the mad eyes for it. He’s got the crazed anguished relish of a nutter off to a tee.
Maybe he’s gonna go rip that officer’s balls out with his teeth? But no. He disappears into a river.
More slo-moing at the end as Marie is found, examined by men in black coats – then removed by men in black coats to her coffin.
30 years on from when i saw my first Herzog film (it was Aguirre) and of course 30 years older, i feel less inclined to indulge in his supposed “visionary genius” these days. His oddball obtuseness seems more like wilful affectation than inspired imagination. Watching recent interviews of Herzog hasn’t helped preserve his cultish charisma either; he comes across, disappointingly, like a mediocre middle-man, totally lacking the magnetic mystique his films were meant to be embodying.
Only Kinski’s demented performance makes this film watchably bearable. Or unbearably watchable.
Dir: Werner Herzog, Germany
5/10
Windows on the World 