Stroszek (1977)

☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Stroszek (1977) – W. Herzog

Apparently, this is the film that Joy Division’s Ian Curtis watched the night he died and it is pretty bleak.  Herzog’s very unique perspective on life is made manifest by the script he wrote, the actors he chose, the locations he found, and an incredible dancing chicken.  Bruno S. (previously the star of Herzog’s Kaspar Hauser) plays a street musician who has spent most of his life institutionalized – in fact, he is playing himself, although there is apparently little improvisation in the film (so we are really getting Herzog’s “ecstatic truth” version of Bruno).  After being released from jail, Bruno hooks up with Eva, a down-on-her-luck prostitute, and they get messed around by her pimps. Berlin turns so depressing that they decide to travel to the USA with Herr Schweitz (an elderly eccentric, also featured in Kaspar Hauser) who has a nephew in Wisconsin.  Arriving there (after a journey that evokes many moods), they get a trailer home, jobs as a mechanic and waitress (respectively), and settle in outside a truckstop.  Herzog’s dead eye sees some black humor in this situation – as the characters struggle to make a living and American capitalism tightens its noose around them.  In the end, there is only the dancing chicken – an apt metaphor for our workaday lives if ever there was one and fully in keeping with Herzog’s heightened (but dark) sense of the absurd.