Two CIA agents — one sick and cynical; the other younger, naive, and impressionable — have already done their work in Salvador Allende’s Chile and, for reasons best left undisclosed, decide to travel to Easter Island to visit its famous Rapa Nui heads. There, surrounded by green valleys, wild horses, and the impressive moáis, John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell — who play the two spies — will talk about everything imaginable to atone for guilt and responsibilities and, in the process, review the long list of crimes committed in the name of their country.
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The new tragicomedy by the Irish Martin McDonagh and, above all, its two main actors, sparked enthusiasm this Thursday at the Venice festival on its second day thanks to its melancholic humor and the inevitable echoes in the present of a film that recreates from its pathos the imperialist fury of Washington.
Caustic and very sad, Wild Horse Nine fits into a genre as popular as buddy movies, in which McDonagh himself left his most twisted mark with The Banshees of Inisherin. Surrounded by a cast that also shines with Steve Buscemi, Parker Posey, and the Chilean Mariana di Girolamo, McDonagh admitted the influence of films like Mikey and Nicky by Elaine May, or Midnight Run by Martin Brest. Both serve as references for a script once again sheltered in the shadow of the Beckettian Vladimir and Estragon.
Wild Horse Nine is a journey through time full of memory and relevance: the characters of Malkovich and Rockwell — whose role in another McDonagh film, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), earned him the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor — evoke the bloodshed in Congo, Guatemala, or the Bay of Pigs to reconnect with the ghosts of Patrice Lumumba or Lee Harvey Oswald. It is a journey to 20th-century imperialism astride a Super 8 camera and two clownish, decadent spies who stroll with a bowler hat on their heads and a Stetson while listening to Joni Mitchell and equating the state of democracies with the quality of their cheeses. “I have always been interested in the CIA’s past and the coup against Salvador Allende,” McDonagh said yesterday. “What I had not foreseen are the resonances with current geopolitics, where nothing is done in secret anymore. Everything has become more and more stupid.”
If we can classify Wild Horse Nine as a political buddy movie, the new work by the German master Werner Herzog, Bucking Fastards, escapes any label. It is a strange, extravagant fable and at times very magnetic. Made with minimal resources, it echoes his early work The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. Herzog follows the steps of two sisters trapped in a sick and crazy way in their synchronized gestures and words and in themselves. Turned into freaks and after a harassment trial against a neighbor played by Orlando Bloom, they wander through life as a solitary and delicate rarity until they find a new goal: to open a tunnel in a mountain that leads them to an imaginary world.
With his usual enthusiasm, deep voice, and that unmistakable aura of a free and solemn man, Herzog explained in Venice that this is a project that had been on his mind for some time but he could not carry it out until now because his idea was to make it with twin actresses (it is slightly inspired by a true story), but he never found them. Until one day he was told about sisters Kate and Rooney Mara, who, although not twins (they are 43 and 41 years old respectively), look very much alike and achieve the miracle of acting in unison, a surreal mimicry full of amazing ideas and nuances.
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Throughout Bucking Fastards, the Maras speak and interpret their characters creating a unique, strange, and harmonious cacophony. Their reaction as siameses is an impressive acting exercise in how their voices and gestures flow simultaneously. Herzog says he shot very quickly, barely one or two takes per shot. “I wrote the script in five days and that speed is in the very essence of the film,” he told the Lido press. Two weeks of rehearsal were enough for the two sisters to find their way of acting in unison. “We share a whole life, a world without words, and, most importantly, childhood. We really enjoyed this rhythm,” Rooney Mara said. “It actually wasn’t that hard because we found a common inner music, a way of speaking that is almost singing. It was much easier than it seems,” her sister added.
Filmed in Ireland and in the Postojna cave in Slovenia, Herzog builds a fiction that also refers to the rich bestiary of his cinema through the presence of a fox cared for by the sisters or the brief appearance of a deer. “The fox is very important in the mechanics of the story, in its architecture. I wanted to find a cub because I wanted them to raise them, but we were unlucky, there wasn’t one in all of Ireland. The deer appeared by chance, and in a film like this chance and accidents are very important,” said the filmmaker. Referring to the caves, he added: “For me, they are a landscape of the human soul, a landscape of our imagination.”
Herzog has dedicated his film to David Lynch, not because Bucking Fastards has anything to do with the cinema of the director of Twin Peaks, but because of the deep understanding they said they had of each other’s respective work. “I would have liked him to be the first viewer of this film,” he warned, “but unfortunately there is no way to go back in time.”
Bucking Fastards is one of those films that will fascinate and repel its viewers in equal parts. And this Thursday it paired, in a coincidence sometimes fostered by festival programmers, with another fascinating duo: Malkovich and Rockwell in Wild Horse Nine.
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