FITZCARROLDO (1982) is the visually lush story of Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald, a dreamer in the Amazon jungle who is determined to open an opera house in a small godforsaken Peruvian town perched on the banks of the mightiest river in the world.
For this purpose he doesn't mind accepting a considerable cash infusion from his girlfriend Molly (Claudia Cardinale), who operates a bordello. This is the story of a passion for the highest art that will gladly accept sponsorship from the lowliest of all arts.
Fitzgerald is played with considerable flair and delirium by Klaus Kinski, the veteran German actor who usually shows up as a bad guy in most of his Movies. In this Werner Herzog movie he is an incurable Caruso fan who has to endure the ridicule of the business barons of the town for dreaming the impossible dream.
The German-language movie (with English subtitles) works if one does not think too much about it. But the trouble starts after taking a step back an d asking some questions.
This is a movie that seems to have grown out of a what-if question and soon took a life of its own in the able hands of Herzog. But at the end nothing is settled. There is no real closure to Fitzcarroldo's obsession. We are left twisting in the wind of unsettled possibilities.
Fitzcarroldo wants to go into rubber manufacturing business to finance the opera house that he dreamed of. That's why he undertakes the central plot action of the whole movie to move a ship over the jungle from one arm of the Amazon to the other in order to reach his rubber fields from the safest route possible.
In this Herculian task hundreds of Indians, who speak no German, help him without asking for a dime in return for no clear reason at all. In one scene actually Fitzcarroldo himself asks the same question to himself aloud - Warum? Warum? Warum? That was a moment of unintended humor I'm afraid.
This is a free-verse-poem of a movie where the logic of the narrative does not hold upon close scrutiny. Most of the characters do not have enough reasons to do what they are doing.
The end is equally put together in an ad hoc fashion because it was foreshadowed at the very beginning of the movie. It HAD to be that way!
By sheer luck a whole opera troupe just happens to be around the bend in the heart of Amazon and isn't that convenient? So our hero just sends over the captain of his ship with arm-full of paper money to fetch the whole opera group (complete with their stage decor) on boats no less to his own battered ship for a final concert.
At the end Fitzgerraldo gets what he wants, sort of, but we have no idea why the rest of the world cooperates with him towards a goal so subjective and capricious as far as the harsh physical and social realities of the Amazon jungle go.
Great production. Cute what-if idea. Weak dramatic tension and sagging narrative.
I rate it 5 out of 10 for the effort and Klaus Kinski's pompadour riot of blonde hair.
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Ugur Akinci, Ph.D. is a Creative CopyWriter, Editor, an experienced and award-winning Technical Communicator specializing in fundraising packages, direct sales copy, web content, press releases and hi-tech documentation.
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Author:: Ugur Akinci
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