Werner Herzog synchronizes sisters Rooney and Kate Mara in ‘Bucking fastard’
The British Martin McDonagh darkens Venice with the devastating existentialism of ‘Wild horse nine’
VeniceIf there is any director who has known how to delve into the existence of the forgotten, those expelled by society, it is Werner Herzog. The Munich filmmaker has built, throughout his prodigious and eclectic career, a family of characters who, by force or by their own will, have found their place on the margins, far from customs, beyond what is accepted or tolerated. This Thursday the Venice Film Festival hosted the world premiere of Bucking fastard, a film that presents two new essential figures of the Herzog universe: Jean and Joan Holbrooke, two sisters who speak, walk, dream, and fall in love in unison. The characters are inspired by twin sisters Freda and Greta Chaplin –who gained notoriety in the 1980s for their peculiar synchrony and their problems with the justice system–, but in Venice, Herzog has ensured that Bucking fastard “is a work of fiction”.
The film by the author of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) shines thanks to the fascinating acting work of sisters Rooney and Kate Mara, who compose a gestural mosaic filled with synchronicities and subtle mismatches. The American actresses construct two figures that point to a single personality, yet, nevertheless, it is evident that we are dealing with two autonomous figures, with different features, expressions, and temperaments, a fact that reveals the murkiest dimension of this ironclad and limiting union. Because it must be said that in the fusion of the Holbrooke sisters, a disturbing paradox emerges: how can it be that two people who live in perfect concordance, always close to one another, can experience such a scorching loneliness?
“At first, the idea of playing two people who are one felt a bit overwhelming, but Kate and I quickly saw that between us there existed a whole shared history that allowed us to build our own world, secret, without words,” explained Rooney Mara. For her part, Kate Mara has highlighted that “building the characters was simpler” than they expected, “like a musical exercise, a question of rhythm”. And Herzog, who recognizes the proximity between the Holbrooke sisters and the protagonist of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), has highlighted that filming Bucking fastard was “like performing open-heart surgery, with a single camera and trying to do a single take for each shot”.
A dramatic spy comedy
The other film presented this Thursday in the official competition of the Venice Film Festival was Wild horse nine, by the Irishman Martin McDonagh, which is already being talked about as one of the major candidates for next year's Oscar awards. The film offers, as is usual in McDonagh's postmodern universe, a peculiar mix of genres –in this case, absurd comedy, existential drama, and spy adventure– and also a festival of sharp dialogues. But it must be said that, in this case, the film's historical setting grants a particular gravity to the project.
“Since my adolescence, I have felt a particular interest in the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende's government,” explained McDonagh to the accredited press. Thus, the action of Wild horse nine focuses on the figure of two agents of the North American intelligence services –a magnificent John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell– who, in 1973 Chile, travel to Easter Island to resolve a personal matter. “The political backdrop allowed me to imagine a CIA agent marked by feelings of guilt. In this way, the film begins as a comedy, but it becomes something profound, sadder, and darker,” says the director of In Bruges (2008).
The political turn that Wild horse nine represents in McDonagh's work is to be celebrated. In fact, beyond the cynicism and amorality of the characters –which gives rise to a permanent game with pitch-black humor–, the film appears covered in a welcome aura of indignation. A critical gaze towards the imperialist tendencies of the United States that McDonagh combines with an existentialist meditation on decadence and mortality. And this is where Wild horse nine finds its limits. On one hand, the vital paralysis of the characters imposes a markedly monotonous tone. And then there are the frustrated attempts by the director of Seven Psychopaths (2012) to build moments of somber tenderness. The intention is to awaken the spectator's empathy, but McDonagh's misanthropy and nihilism end up obscuring the human dimension of the story.