The sardine can is the final boss. After all, the Holbrooke sisters Jean (Kate Mara) and Joan (Rooney Mara) do everything together. Even when vacuuming, they grab the handle with four hands – and when they come to a narrow place where one of them would have to let go briefly to pass, the panicked screaming starts. You could almost mistake them for conjoined twins, but not only have they not grown together, they are not even twins. But if you try to use the fiddly can mechanism with two people, then the sardine can stays closed. Even the language is spoken in unison – right down to the linguistic error in the titular insulting rhyme “Bucking Fastard”.
If the title of Werner Herzog’s 79th feature film seems strange to you at first, all you have to do is swap the first letters of the words. The dubbing initially seems like a rehearsed magic trick, but even in spontaneous situations it works perfectly. That’s why the court even issued a new rule for the sisters: for the first time in British judicial history, two witnesses were allowed to testify together. “Bucking Fastard” loosely follows the story of Greta and Freda Chaplin, who gained international fame through the British tabloid press in the 1980s. However, Herzog does not turn it into a classic biopic, but rather a modern fairy tale that no one else could do except him.
In the opening credits of “Bucking Fastard,” the names of the leading actresses are merged together and listed as Kate Rooney Mara.
It starts with the aforementioned court hearing. Local gigolo Gareth Mulroney (gorgeously ragged with his shirt open and tie hanging around his neck: Lord of the Rings hunk Orlando Bloom) has filed for a restraining order against the sisters. After what he saw as a casual affair with them (yes, sex only happens in pairs), he married another woman. But for Jean and Joan, one true love lasts forever – and so they regularly attack their lover with garbage bags on the street or even set his SUV on fire with 100 percent alcohol.
It’s mischievous fun to watch the sisters commit their misdeeds, which they commit not out of any willful malice, but rather out of a disarming naivety. This is a bit reminiscent of the Disney comedy “Enchanted” with Amy Adams as an animated princess who falls into a well and comes crawling out of a manhole in real Manhattan. Jean and Joan also seem like characters from a fairy tale who are stranded in the wrong world. So they start looking for a suitable place, somewhere between Orkney and Atlantis, because they can’t stay at home anyway because of the injunction. Jean and Joan meet a helpful social worker (Domhnall Gleeson), an evil hunter and a fox with probably the saddest eyes in the world.
If you dig deep enough, you’ll find Werner Herzog’s dreams
The fairytale and the outsider are elements that one would certainly associate with Werner Herzog’s previous work. Nevertheless, if an uninitiated audience were to blindly guess the director of “Bucking Fastard” after the first hour, he probably wouldn’t even make it into the top 50 most obvious names. But exactly the opposite applies to the last 30 to 40 minutes, because only this one filmmaker could have told them: a supposedly pointless tunnel construction into nowhere as an existentialist exercise like the 300-ton river steamer “Molly” in “Fitzcarraldo” that Klaus Kinski brought over the hill. And then there’s a hole in the wall that makes you wonder whether the Holbrooke sisters haven’t suddenly ended up in a completely different Herzog film by slipping through.
His loyal fans will love it, others will frown in surprise. But what everyone can agree on is the brilliance of the performances from Kate Mara (“House Of Cards”) and Rooney Mara (“Verblendeung”). Werner Herzog even declined an invitation to the Cannes Film Festival because he didn’t get a place in the competition there, but he didn’t want to deprive his leading actresses of the chance to win an acting prize. So a few months later it was the Venice Film Festival. By the way, it’s not just the synchronous speaking that leaves such a huge impression – so the only question now is whether, after the British court, the Oscar Academy will also introduce a new rule and allow two actresses to be nominated together for the first time.
Conclusion: At the age of 83, Werner Herzog once again delivers a modern fairy tale that is as wonderfully absurd as it is quirky and touching. During the first hour, hardly anyone would have guessed that it could have come from the director of “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo”. But by the last half hour at the latest, Werner Herzog is back in full swing! This may throw an inexperienced audience off track in the home stretch, but the director’s numerous ultra-fans around the globe will particularly celebrate this trip into the stalactite caves.
We saw Bucking Fastard at the Venice Film Festival, where it had its world premiere as part of the official competition.