FILM CHALLENGE: 38) Stroszek

38) Stroszek

Director: Werner Herzog

Year: 1977

Plot Summary: Bruno Stroszek is released from prison and warned to stop drinking. On his first day out, determined to start a new life, he befriends Eva, a prostitute down on her luck. After they are harried and beaten by Eva's pimps, they decide to join Bruno's neighbor, Scheitz, as he leaves Germany to live in Wisconsin. In that winter bound, barren prairie, Bruno works as a mechanic and Eva as a waitress, but things aren't that different from their life in Germany.

I have more respect for Werner Herzog than I do for any other director working in the film industry today. In an age where films have to be shown to focus groups and movies are studied by businessmen in regards to what audience demographic they should be advertised to, Herzog simply doesn't care and makes the movies that he wants to make.

Therefore, while other directors who were popular in the 70s have now become part of this Hollywood machine and their work has suffered from it, like Martin Scorcese, everything Herzog has made in recent years, from Grizzly Man to Bad Lieutenant, is just as intriguing as his older work.

One of these older films is Stroszek, Herzog's cynical look at the American Dream.

Stroszek is certainly a sad and upsetting story, but the director somehow gives it a warm, touching and often amusing touch too. Remarkably, Herzog is able to switch the tone almost effortlessly without it ever detracting from the narrative. For example, the scene is which Bruno's house is taken by the bank and auctioned off, in a powerful extended shot of the protagonist stood in disbelief, is followed almost immediately by a bizarrely humorous scene of the old, fragile and harmless Mr. Scheitz storming into a shop with a rifle to steal $30 for food from the supermarket across the road. These constant shifts from morose to hilarious and heartbreaking to touching seem to recreate what life is really like.

The most amazing moments of Stroszek are undoubtedly the final scenes though. In a typical Werner Herzog fashion, they are unlike anything you'd expect to see in a film and are as weird as they come, but somehow feel like the perfect conclusion nonetheless. There's a rabbit on a toy fire engine, a chicken playing the piano and another dancing to a jukebox. There's Bruno clutching onto a Turkey on a ski lift in an American Indian village and a recurring image of a truck going around in circles. Sure, it sounds like the work of a mad man, but there is obviously some incredible symbolism and metaphor here. The ski lift, for example, could well represent the entire rise and fall of Bruno's time in America. This is enforced by the fact he's clutching a turkey; an animal used on Thanksgiving in the USA to celebrate happiness and family, which Bruno has now lost. The ski lift could be symbolic of the ever-lasting circle his life is taking as could the circling truck.

I am open for suggestions about what the musical animals mean though!

There's also some interesting use of foreshadowing at the beginning of the movie when the story is set in Berlin that represent the aforementioned idea of Bruno's life going around in circles. For example, the way Eva cleans his piano is almost identical to the way that she cleans up in the restaurant suggesting that her character really doesn't achieve anything more in America than she had in Germany. Similarly, Bruno playing his accordion in the Berlin slums and his motorhome in the USA seems to say the same thing for him.

This is the first time I'd watched Stroszek, a film that reminded me of Dogville which I reviewed earlier in the blog, and I am looking forward to picking it up on DVD as there is surely a lot of other interesting things to find. Over time, I can see my admiration for this film turning into genuine adoration and, later, I may even consider it one of the finest films ever made.

4/5

By Daniel Sarath with 2 comments