Occasionally sublime, often ridiculous and always extravagantly weird, Werner Herzog‘s “Bucking Fastard,” unlike its gorgeously interlinked protagonists, is a film of multiple personalities that only rarely speak in unison. Kate and Rooney Mara, appearing together — oh so together — for the first time, are endlessly fascinating playing two sisters who speak and react simultaneously and identically, less a pair of people than a palimpsest of a single person. This unprecedented duality is not simply a casting and acting coup, it is rich with potential meaning and mood: there is something inexpressibly sad and beautiful about the ideas it prompts, about the loneliness of the human condition, about the polite savagery of society towards its outliers, about the nature of kinship and whether it’s possible — and maybe even enviable — for two people to share one soul, the way they might share a teapot.
But this is Werner Herzog, and by God and the fundamentally chaotic nature of the Universe, Herzog gonna Herzog. And so, despite the already richly strange premise, there must also be dream sequences in which fluttering birds twitter madly in their cages, sidebars about sneering hunters culling probably-not-rabid foxes and baroque digressions about the genome of the cave salamander. With Ernst Reijseger’s wonderfully varied score keeping pace, through folk fiddle and classical cello and stretches of wondering, wandering piano, there just have to be touches of fairytale and a dose of Looney Tunes. For some reason we need loads of quasi-mythological musings on the nature of devotion and whole lot of mummery about the Orkney Islands, all stuffed into a narrative that becomes increasingly estranged from anything resembling a reality to which we might usefully return, arms laden, with all these new splendors to relate.
