Werner Herzog
Invincibile

THE REVIEW

He was one of the directors I loved the most, and therefore, even in front of a not fully successful work like this one, I will still keep his banner flying high.

Presented in Venice in 2001, it was distributed in Italy seven years later, a true negative record for this film set in a confused and derelict era, at the dawn of the Third Reich, where great and tragic events were preparing, and where violence, once again!, would predictably reign, and then nothing would be the same as before.

On this unsettling stage, two different characters meet and clash, both real and complementary to each other, with the traditional beautiful woman in between, a classical pianist; a strong young Jew, a new Samson, and a false Danish nobleman, a typical Herzogian character, played by an excellent Tim Roth, prince of hidden darkness, here related to the Nibelungic, magical-esoteric Nazism, much of which has been concealed and which has always accompanied Uncle Adolf & Co., as Giorgio Galli could well have testified.

The superb settings, from the Eastern Polish shtetls with their markets filled with miserable life (not for nothing had Herzog returned after ten years to making a film after an interesting documentary life), to the Berlin über alles with its modernist imprint, would deserve a discussion of their own but even if Our visionary flashes remain like recalcitrant, down in the holster, they are always there, ready to fire at the slightest hint, and they are well glimpsed between one scene and another of the film.

Yet something nevertheless didn't work beyond the little messianic ending where the roles reverse, but we will soon come to terms with it and if the multitude of red crabs won't save us, we will go back with our thoughts to that prolonged, terrible, circular tracking shot on a now drifted raft, completely overrun by bouncing little monkeys and with our Aguirre definitively lost in his own delirium, Prosit.