OVERVIEW
Werner Herzog once again turns his attention to people consumed by the everlasting quest for fulfillment. This time there are two of them, although Jean and Joan Holbrooke (Kate Mara and Rooney Mara) might disagree with that distinction. The film starts with them being taken to court for repeatedly harassing Ken Iveson (Orlando Bloom), a lorry driver they both simultaneously fell in love with, and who initially returned their affection before moving on and marrying another woman. When the trial rules against them, Jean and Joan are left searching for their place in a society that sees them mostly as a freakish curiosity. That longing eventually leads them to dig through the Irish mountains toward the Orkney Islands, an imagined place where they might finally be seen with love.
BACKGROUND
Herzog first conceived Bucking Fastard more than three decades ago, after meeting Freda and Greta Chaplin, the identical English twins whose lives loosely inspired the film. The real sisters became tabloid fixtures in the early 1980s, prosecuted in York for harassing a local lorry driver, and the title comes from a synchronized verbal slip they made during the trial. Herzog discussed the project publicly as early as 1991 and later wrote about meeting the twins in his memoir.
As he has done throughout his career, Herzog turned the real story into one of his peculiar fables, moving the sisters to Ireland and returning, alongside longtime collaborators Peter Zeitlinger and Ernst Reijseger, to his fascination with impossible dreams and the people who give their lives to them. Bucking Fastard is also the first film Kate and Rooney Mara have made together, and they prepared extensively for the synchronized performances even though the shoot itself moved fast, finishing ahead of schedule and under budget. The film was invited to Cannes, but Herzog declined after it was denied a competition slot, wanting the Maras to have a chance at acting prizes, and premiered the film at Venice instead.
THE REVIEW
Hopefully the Maras will receive the flowers Herzog was so adamant they deserved, because their performances are simply sublime. It truly feels like one singular performance expressed through two bodies. In a just world, they would occupy one shared spot on a Best Actress Oscar nomination list, replicating the unusual exception mentioned during the film’s opening trial. Their synchronization is remarkably precise, yet it also feels completely instinctive, as if the same impulse simply travels through both bodies at once. Soon, we forget the trick entirely, and what emerges is the shared core behind their remarkable connection: lonely souls driven by the most universal of desires, to find a place where they can be loved for who they truly are.
Before getting there, Herzog finds plenty of comedy in the practical absurdities of their shared existence. Jean and Joan try to vacuum together and cannot both fit between two sofas, struggle to turn a key while both holding it, and cannot open a sardine can, because even the smallest task has to accommodate two people. Their stubborn commitment to living this way becomes more endearing as the outside world grows determined to interfere. People attempt to photograph them naked through a window, approach them for selfies, or try to cut a piece of hair in order to tell the sisters apart. Herzog, however, treats them with enormous empathy, never reducing them to objects of ridicule or pity, and the best and most touching scenes come out of their demonstrations of love: for each other, for the people who want to help them, and for a fox as lost in the world as they are.
Like Stroszek, Bucking Fastard is divided by unofficial but clearly defined chapters, often shifting to the next one before we feel we have had enough of the previous. The first, built around the trial that establishes everything, is the tightest and the funniest, and it contains what is easily the best performance of Orlando Bloom’s career. The film loosens once Jean and Joan retreat from public life, and it follows them into the Irish mountains, where an old belief that the caves might run all the way to the Orkney Islands gives them a new purpose, accompanied by Ernst Reijseger’s reliably peculiar mixture of strings, cello, piano and folk music. By the final and most thematically conclusive chapter, Herzog has already said most of what he set out to say, and he reframes the ideas from the first two chapters in a more obvious (and boring) way.
After years of religious devotion to digging and ritualistic labor toward an imagined destination, the tunnel does take Jean and Joan somewhere new, though what waits at the other end is a tourist attraction, where another object of affection briefly offers the possibility of finally finding love. As so often with Herzog, arrival at the promised land offers no salvation, just another door onto another empty promise. Perhaps there is no place in this world for people like Jean and Joan.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Our affection for Jean and Joan is what holds Bucking Fastard together, through a film that keeps shifting between amusing, compelling, and bizarre, sometimes within the same scene. It is frustrating given how much potential there is to take their story even deeper, and perhaps spending longer in those first two chapters might have done just that. Kate and Rooney Mara are fantastic, carrying us through even the interminable stretches of their journey and making us hope, against everything Herzog shows us, that they might eventually find what they are looking for.
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- Where to watch
- Coming soon
- Where to watch
- Coming soon
Play trailer
- Original title
- Bucking Fastard
- Director
- Werner Herzog
- Genre
- Drama
- Cast
- Kate Mara, Rooney Mara, Orlando Bloom, Domhnall Gleeson, Hugh O'Conor, Simon Delaney, Terry McMahon, Shane Connellan
- Screenwriter
- Werner Herzog
- Composer
- Ernst Reijseger
- Cinematography
- Peter Zeitlinger
- Editor
- Marco Capalbo
- Country
- Language
- English