Stroszek (1977) is an odd synthesis of Werner Herzog and Raymond Carver--more like Five Easy Pieces than Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, or Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Herzog's movies are often about the interplay of man and nature, man and beast; though he pans his singularly ethnographic lens from Berlin to Railroad Flats, Wis., in Stroszek, this movie seems to present life as a flat line that goes from urban European dreariness to its equivalent in rural America. Grubbiness is an insuperable condition for Bruno, the depressive street musician who was abused at a Nazi reform school growing up and has been bullied ever since, and Eva, his blank-faced prostitute girlfriend. No doubt its roots are in New Hollywood at its most cynical (Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy), and it probably served as inspiration for the even-more-abstract immigrant tale Stranger than Paradise, and the American indie boomlet to come. There's a strain of defeatism here that may have been tailored to the movie's star, Bruno S., but Herzog's almost stodgily objective style seems appreciative of the small pleasures of life, of music, of a premature baby that still has a chance to grow up, even of American kitsch, and the American dream on its most shoestring scale. This isn't the story of a classy European slumming in the hinterlands. The old German uncle who uses a voltage meter to measure "animal spirits" is as goofy as the American nephew who thrusts his hips in a yokel sex dance or the banker who's clearly out of his depth--he seems almost as diminutive as the pubescent agent on Louie, a show that's no doubt on the same wavelength as Herzog's sense of humor. When the expats join the nephew in his search to find a tractor (and its driver) under a frozen lake, there's something about this eccentric Calvin and Hobbes hi-jink that's as rewarding as a cup of hot coffee on a frosty day--but with that morbid undertone that makes their happiness as fragile as the ice. Sad-sack Bruno, the only member of the expatriate trio who doesn't learn English, sees the end point on the horizon before the movie does--and it almost seems like a cheat when the movie catches up to him with a vengeance. There's a barber-shop robbery as poorly conceived as any crime in a Coen Brothers movie, and a selling out of a character that seems to be excused only because Bruno is by then unhinged. The film, reportedly written in two days, is more like a short story than a feature. Bruno worries what will happen to his instruments--like his dusty piano, his "black friend"--when he croaks, and we don't know; they don't follow him to the New World. And Herzog can't hold in his bafflement about kitsch forever, so the final scene is a doozy: "We can't stop the dancing chicken," says a cop who looks to be of Pacific Northwestern Indian extraction, in regard to the livestock arcade that Bruno sets off when he reaches the literal end of his rope. They can't stop the dancing chicken. Is that his legacy? Bruno seems borderline autistic--although when people are speaking in rat-a-tat German, it's hard to tell. He's a good man who purses his lip when he talks and emotes at times with silent-film grandiosity, but he's also a weak man--or at least a man who was irreparably broken long ago. Ian Curtis saw this film before Joy Division was to go on its American tour; he killed himself instead.
