Stroszek

Werner Herzog wrote Stroszek for Bruno Schleinstein, who had played Kaspar Hauser for him three years earlier, and the poster calls it a ballad. That is the right word. It has a few verses, a chorus of bad luck and no moral at the end. It follows a man out of prison in Berlin, across the Atlantic and into a mobile home on a flat piece of Wisconsin, and it watches him lose, slowly and without comment. It is one of the best things Herzog has done, and it is close to the only one in which he plainly likes the person in front of the camera.

Schleinstein does not act in any sense a drama school would recognise. He talks about himself in the third person, delivers lines as if reading them off the inside of his own head, and stops mid-sentence to look at something nobody else has noticed. Herzog lets him. Eva Mattes plays Eva with a tired patience, a woman who has stopped expecting anything and is surprised to find she can still be kind to someone. Clemens Scheitz, small and courteous, carrying a homemade instrument for measuring things nobody else believes in, is the film’s comedy and its saddest sight.

Thomas Mauch shoots Berlin in brown corridors and grey courtyards, and then shoots Wisconsin in a light so wide and flat it has nowhere to hide anyone. The mobile home sits on its plot like something left behind after a move, and the fields run to the edge of the frame in every direction. Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus lets scenes run past the point where most editors would cut, so that a doctor showing off a premature baby’s grip, or two farmers arguing over a boundary from the seats of their tractors, goes on until it stops being an anecdote and becomes the film. Chet Atkins’s guitar comes in when the plane lands, clean and hopeful. Sonny Terry’s harmonica, which sounds like a man laughing through a cold, keeps coming back.

Not all of it works. The Berlin section runs long, and the pimps, played by Norbert Grupe and Burkhard Driest as plain brutes, bring a nastiness the film does not need twice. Some of the American material is Herzog pointing at things, a deer hunter, a bank, a television left on, and leaving us to draw the lesson. The reviews so far are cooler than we are, and more than one finds the culture-clash jokes obvious. They are obvious. We do not think they are jokes. Herzog is not laughing at the bank teller (Scott McKain), who is decent and embarrassed and doing his job; he is watching a system that never once raises its voice.

There is a speech Bruno gives Eva in the mobile home about how in Germany they kicked him in the open, and here they do it with a smile and nobody lays a hand on you. Schleinstein says it looking slightly past her. It moved us more than we thought it would, not because the line is eloquent but because it is not. It is a man working something out aloud, and it is the moment the film says, plainly, what it is about. We sat with it for a long time afterwards.

Against Herzog’s own record this is the quiet one. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) had a madman and a river; Heart of Glass (1976) had a hypnotised cast and a prophecy. Stroszek has a street musician, a prostitute, a pensioner and a garage, and after Heart of Glass it looked to some like a retreat. We think it was a correction. Herzog is at his best when he stops looking for visions and finds one man who cannot help being strange.

The final sequence, which most critics mention first, we will leave alone. Watch it at home, in the evening, with nobody who needs a plot; it runs 108 minutes and moves at the pace of its lead. It will not cheer you up. It may make you kinder to the next person you see busking, which is more than most films manage.