Reviews

Solondz' movies leave you perplexed. And then, after thinking about what you have experienced, after talking about it with like-minded folks, after seeing it another time, it suddenly all makes sense. Almost. Here are some clues after some thinking:

• So, Aviva is always the same girl even when she changes her name (to Henrietta, the name of her unborn child) and we are presented a linear story which actually makes sense. Really!

• The formal structure is a palindrome, people and themes appear two times with Ma Sunshine and the Huckleberry episode as centre. It is not completely symmetric, but that is not the point. Remember Mark Wiener's speech about everyone always being the same? So, there might be some programmatic statement in the formal structure: a re-interpretation (or perhaps critique) of the Bildungsroman (educational tale) and other story lines which presuppose a constant development of the individual (also everyone is talking about how they have changed - and they really haven't).

• Abortion. What do we make of this? I guess Solondz is after something completely different than to make a stance pro-choice or anti-abortion. Maybe he chooses exactly such a controversial topic to demonstrate how difficult it is to judge morally when it all boils down to 'people' and their struggles to be a good and happy person. Aviva wants a baby no matter what happens, therefore Dr Fleischer is her "natural" enemy. Her mother hates to be a mother ("the embryo is just a cancer"), therefore she is pro-choice. People act out of deep-seated need rather than because of moral judgments. That is at least the movie's claim, as far as I can see. I am not sure if I agree, but I like the way in which it is presented: Food for thought.

This one is about waiting, about being a stranger, about a waiting stranger. The gist of this movie is existentialist: the engineer is thrown into the village, he is alone (his somewhat sardonic colleagues are voices in his head, maybe they are only parts of his personality) and he is waiting for the death of an old villager. The stasis eventually dissolves when he leaves his role as observer and becomes involved, and we can move on, too. Like always the impressive Iranian scenery is worth it alone. Not much more to say, I am afraid, watch it if you are more interested in questions than in answers, if you can bear watching a movie which is not about actions but about waiting for action.

According to IMDb trivia most of the actors were hypnotized by Herzog and given instructions to carry out while acting. Aware of this many comments mention the hypnotizing quality of the movie. The movie is slow and very weird, indeed. Take one scene: Two men sit at a table, they drink beer and talk about a prophecy that one of them will sleep off his hangover lying on the dead body of the other. In the course of this conversation one tears the other at his hair, who hits back with his beer mug, and so on. Later we see that the prophecy has come true. And later on the living is taking the dead one into the tavern to dance with his corpse.

Heart of glass was written by Herbert Achternbusch, a prolific Bavarian film-maker and author who got some (mostly local) attention during the 1970s/80s because of his ruthless opposition against the Bavarian reactionary catholic government (personated by the late Franz Josef Strauss). The movie bears a lot of resemblance to Achternbusch's other works. Since Herzog is much better known world-wide I will focus on Achternbusch's contribution here.

Achternbusch always mixes his own strange private mythology with regional influences from Northern Bavaria (Niederbayern, Bayrischer Wald) and other (often ancient Greek, but also all kinds of 'native') mythology. The outcome is not very accessible, of course, but there are some threads which help to read his works.

There is the anarchist despise of power and the sympathy with the victims of power. But this sympathy never leads to illusions about the poor and the wretched. They are ugly, because they are made ugly, their emotions are coarse - like in the scene described above, where two friends are only able to express their affection through violence and death. In Achternbusch's works the only place outside a world where power and violence affect everyone and everything is ruled by absurdity. Where he fails to make sense, his journey to freedom begins. Not unlike his fellow countryman Karl Valentin, he explores the limits of his own language because language is reason is the tool of the powerful.

Achternbusch once said that the only genuine national culture which post-war Germany had left after Worldwar II was that it had no national culture, and that it is losing this as well after 1989. "Heart of Glass" follows a similar 'logic': The industrial revolution (represented here by the glass-works) once was carried by a dream, a secret knowledge (the red ruby). This vision of turning the world in a gleaming cold world of glass was terrible in itself yet bore some beauty. Now that this dream is lost, industrialization is running loose turning the world into a burning hell, aka Worldwars I and II.

But here I shall stop trying to make sense of the movie, it refuses to yield to reason and so shall I.

P.S.: Funny to talk about "Spoilers" when it comes to movies like this.

Why that lame finish? Come on, this movie deserved a more diligent handling of every movie's more precious part: the ending. It starts out so careful. Characters are evolving slowly. Losses and hopes are balanced and we have no idea where the whole thing is heading. But then - spoilers ahead!!! - who believes that the _boy_ (remember his tight bond to his parents?) will turn over night into a fighting machine defeating a trained army corps??? Still, the twist with the army being the biggest threat of all (forget about the deadly virus): excellent!