Elisa Giudici reporting from Venice
BUCKING FASTARD © Gateway to Orkney LLC
Back in the 1980s, Werner Herzog met the Chaplin twin sisters for a project, but he is the first to warn against connecting his return to fiction filmmaking after a string of documentary projects too closely to that real story. In his new film Bucking Fastard, Jean and Joan are not twins but sisters who "speak, move, dress, dream and even slip their tongues, as the title proves, in the very same way." The movie is about their quest for true love, one that is neither particularly well planned nor particularly successful, as if the point were simply to find a way not to feel alone. Joan and Jean feel that way - alone together - even though they are always together, even though their understanding of each other is absolute...
Their grasp on contemporary reality is not that strong. They kind of know the internet is there, for example, but think that if they don't use it, their photo can't possibly end up online. More interestingly, our grasp of what made them the way they are is even weaker. We meet the sisters in a dream they share, full of colorful birds locked in cages, before their own actions eventually leave them to be similarly caged in a small apartment by the docks somewhere in the city. It's a late walk into a dream that Herzog decided to add while editing the movie, following its dedication to David Lynch. That is probably the real key to understanding, if that's even possible, what Bucking Fastard is about. Their true love, a drunkard played by Orlando Bloom who crashes into a church during a service in order to "meeting the devil" is getting married after letting "his little cowgirls ride him." Joan and Jean become angry, vengeful and a little arsonistic, so it's no surprise that they eventually end up in court .
The sisters remain convinced that he is their true love; they have no objection whatsoever to sharing him. The beauty of the central duet lies in how natural and instinctive it is. There is nothing methodical or mechanical about the amazing "shared" performance of the real life Mara sisters (Kate and Rooney) who never feel rehearsed.
Rooney Mara & Kate Mara in BUCKING FASTARD © From Gateway to Orkney, LLC
Since Herzog appears to be uninterested in the sometimes mystical connection between the sisters, the film retains an alluring mystery to how they became like this. He's even less interested in exploring their family (except for one heartbreaking scene in which they return home and discover that their own parents pretending not to be there, ashamed of their "love crazed" daughters). They remain unknowable which is part of their charm. Less appealing to the audience is the way everyone around them (especially the men) tries to police their synchronicity and way of life. The worst men are driven by the desire to see them naked or even to tell them apart (even though they don't actually look like twins), which causes the sisters trauma. The less problematic men interfere in subtler ways, gently trying to convince them to be more functional by acting separately, one at a time.
The first act of the movie is rooted in the continuous, mutual misunderstanding between the girls and the world. While inspired by the Chaplin sisters (who were born in 1943) the film takes place in the contemporary world (social media, selfies and smartphones) but the girls are out of time. They seem to think the most efficient, perhaps the only, way to communicate is by letter or postcard.
When the sisters decide on a change of scenery, embracing the fact that they are not cut out for "the city," they return to the countryside. Here Herzog returns to a visual dimension reminiscent of his naturalistic documentaries. The scenery, both real and imagined (the caves are not real, Herzog underlined during press conference), takes hold of the movie, while the girls try to outgrow their first true love by extending an existing tunnel all the way to the Orkney Islands. This is an impossible, incongruous, and physically demanding self-imposed task inspired by a legend they hear. "Everyone should dig a tunnel once in their life." Chasing something impossible and useless simply for the sake of it reads like an incredibly subtle and sad answer to the their quest for true love. They already have it in each other, in their extraordinary understanding of one another.
I hope this description conveys how, unlike its protagonists, the movie is made up of two very different, almost incompatible halves. The first half, incredibly powerful, revolves entirely around a one-of-a-kind dual performance and the way the girls' strangeness is never fully understood or accepted, unless by those who want to exploit it. The second half is full of small, fantastical stories without any strong or clear reason to be there, even within the dreamlike, tenuous logic of a story that increasingly resembles a legend or a tale from some mythical place, like the Atlantis the women dream about. A movie without a precise purpose, wandering through strange landscapes and even stranger characters, is probably the best homage Herzog could have conjured up for his colleague David Lynch. Yet even a flâneur relies on some kind of instinct for selecting the allegorical or the outright "useless" and assembling a story out of it. Herzog loses some of that instinct in the second half of Bucking Fastard, or perhaps he never really had it; his filmmaking sensibility goes in another direction, often shaped by confronting the strangeness of the world in order to understand and explain it through documentary form.
On the set of BUCKING FASTARD © From Gateway to Orkney, LLC
Even if it's not entirely successful, Bucking Fastard is fascinatingly strange movie, and the performances by Kate Mara and Rooney Mara make it well worth watching. It is wonderful to see how they channel their similar yet never entirely overlapping sensibilities into two seemingly identical but subtly distinct characters. It is also a joy to see their unique professional paths finally intersecting in a movie that feels entirely coherent with both of their careers.