I wanted to pick a funny film for this week’s post-April Fool’s Fandor spotlight, and I don’t know what it says about me that I immediately gravitated to Werner Herzog’s demented, bleak Stroszek. Though set in the then-present 1970s, the film would make an easy double bill with last week’s spotlighted film, Meek’s Cutoff. Both are narratives about the folly of strangers entering unknown territory, though Herzog’s suggests that the modern age is no more hospitable to journeymen and outcasts than older, simpler times.
Bruno S, Herzog’s second muse, plays the titular protagonist, an alcoholic busker who decides to ditch Berlin for the land of opportunity with his elderly neighbor Scheitz (Clemens Scheitz) and Eva (Eva Mattes), a sex worker for whom Bruno pines. Yet where most coming-to-America stories focus on the big city and the excitement of metropolis life, Stroszek quickly bypasses New York City as nothing more than a harbor, and soon the trio continue to head out west like their emigrant forebears, trekking all the way to Wisconsin as if on a journey to find the least exciting place in the country.
The dark comedy piles on fast. Bruno doesn’t speak a word of English, but he knows that when the group purchases a mobile home that various usurers will come calling in no time. Sure enough, a bank representative shows up at their door, speaking as if sheer unctuous false charm can somehow break down language barriers. And maybe it does; Bruno picks up on the man’s sugar-sweetened poison in an instant. Later, in an attempt to convey his emotions, Bruno shows Eva a chaotically assembled wooden sculpture and proclaims, “This is a schematic model of how it looks inside Bruno.” If that’s not Herzogian enough, Scheitz spends his days researching literal animal magnetism, investigating the potential of elemental energy to be transferred between creatures.
At a certain point, the line between mordant humor and outright despair erases entirely. Herzog of course is no stranger to films about psychosis and the manner in which a natural environment both creates and reflects the individual’s state of mind, but he forgoes his peripatetic style in this film; indeed, no road movie has ever seemed so static. Herzog trains his camera on vistas of nothing, taking in a temperate midwestern chill that is neither warm nor cold, as if even the weather feels it has no chance to be something in this kind of place. When the bank finally comes for the mobile home, a master shot of a swiftly executed auction feels like the seed from which Roy Andersson’s anti-joke social comedies spring. And only Herzog could make a punchline of Bruno responding to Eva’s hopeful statement “They don’t kick you here,” with “No, not physically. Here, they do it spiritually.”
Only in the finale does the film at last embrace the absurdity buried in such moments, with a bank heist foiled by federal holiday that gives way to a whirlwind tour through a depressing local amusement park. Numerous comic details fill this section, from Bruno and Scheitz’s bumbling-thieves routine to Bruno walking right past unconcerned cops while holding a stolen frozen turkey and a shotgun. But even when the film gives over to comedy entirely, it caps off its cathartic release with a suicide, and it’s a testament to Herzog’s demented energy that it’s still not clear, nearly 40 years later, if this is meant to be the last joke.
If you’re interesting in watching Stroszek on Fandor, use your Movie Mezzanine coupon for an exclusive discount and access to a breathtaking library of cinema!
