In outsider visionaries such as Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo or Timothy Treadwell, renegade German director Werner Herzog has created some of cinema’s most memorable monomaniacs – characters singularly obsessed with finding mythical cities made of gold, with building opera houses in the middle of the rainforest, or with befriending wild grizzly bears. But suggestions that they could be role models for the modern-day neurodiversity movement send this famously fearless film-maker running for the hills. The protagonist pair of Bucking Fastard, the new film that Herzog has brought to the Lido, slots right into his gallery of single-minded outsiders.
Real-life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara play siblings Jean and Joan Holbrooke, who have separate bodies but speak in unison, dress the same and share the same preoccupations. First they fall in love with their washed-up heart-throb neighbour (played by Orlando Bloom) and exact revenge when he marries another woman, then they embark on a quixotic quest to dig a tunnel connecting a cave in County Sligo to the Orkneys. Contemporary psychiatrists might detect behaviour consistent with autism or ADHD hyper-focus.
The film is loosely based on the lives of Freda and Greta Chaplin, an intensely mutually attached pair of twins from York whom the German director met in the 1980s and who coined the spoonerism of the title in a court hearing. Like the Chaplins, the Holbrookes are ostracised by their family and neighbours, but in the film they also show resilience and find allies and supporters. Yet in Bucking Fastard, the sisters rescue a young fox who, contrary to the warnings of a gang of overzealous hunters, doesn’t infect them with rabies.
You want to dig up a den and bring me a little fox – I’m not into that.” At 83, could the radical doomsayer of European art-house cinema be discovering his sentimental side? Bucking Fastard features a sequence shot inside a large karst cave system near Postojna, Slovenia, which Herzog described in similarly reverential tones as the French subterranean landscape in 2010’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams: “It is a landscape of the soul, a landscape of the imagination.” His old-fashioned way of looking at the world keeps winning him young admirers, he claimed. Last year, he started his own Instagram account, where he has posted reels of himself barbecuing, doing DIY and unboxing packages.
He said he did it at the behest of his youngest son, who told his father he shouldn’t be so isolated from his audience. Since he still doesn’t own a own mobile phone, however, he hasn’t been able to check out the content-creating competition. The curators told me there was a Godard retrospective right before mine, and the people who came to that?
They were all Godard’s age.
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