Bucking Fastard is a Picaresque That Never Makes Its Way Home
Words: Maia Wyman
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I have two distant cousins who are sisters in their forties, and they have never left home. For my entire life they have lived in their large family house near JFK airport with their parents, and have become increasingly estranged from the outside world. Time sloughs away for the rest of us, but my cousins remain frozen, unmarried, childlike, and doting on their domineering mother who has worn a severe bowl-cut for as long as I’ve known her. It’s an odd tragedy isn’t it? Not unlike Little and Big Edie, or the too-precious-for-this-world coed siblings of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers and Lanthimos’ Dogtooth. The sisters of Werner Herzog’s latest, Bucking Fastard, are not so tragic. At least, Herzog seems to think so.
Jean and Joan Halbrooke (played by real life sisters Kate and Rooney Mara) are a pair of demure yet impish sisters who do everything together: speak, dress, open sardine cans, and even bone. To some in their world (which is inexplicably set in Ireland), the women are freaks of nature. To men, they are a lusty conquest. To themselves, they are simply the same person. The Halbrookes operate within such an insular and self-contained code of rules that even something as simple as one sister having her hair cut is enough to send them spiraling. The balance must always be restored. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
“Kate and Rooney Mara do an excellent job with this rather fun acting exercise, but their synchronised speech is sometimes distracting, and bears down cumbersomely upon the individual performances.”
We meet the sisters taking the witness stand during a court hearing in which they are being served a restraining order for stalking and harassing their brutishly handsome neighbour, Mr. Mulroney (Orlando Bloom). Despite being removed from their home and placed into a state-funded apartment in Dublin, and Mulroney getting married to another woman, the sisters’ love remains undying. Many questions are raised by this point, but Herzog’s lips remain sealed, and his mind wandering.
From here we watch the sisters galavant about town, arm in arm, encountering various and varied characters in picaresque fashion. They do not have internet and dress as if The Row made a line of Amish wear, yet they have a destructive streak too. Evidenced not only by the series of harmful pranks they play on Mr. Mulroney, but by nearly killing (perhaps fairly) their landlord who has been taking nudes of them at night from a roof across from the apartment he rents to them.
The strange clashing of absurd naivete and shrewd vindictiveness are an alchemy of alienation. The girls have a quixotic worldview that is at odds with the world around them, which causes them to lash out. So, rather than unpacking these ideas on the ground Herzog has already laid out, the girls spend a sluggish final third of the film literally digging for a “better world” in a cave near their Aunt’s house in County Sligo. For two years they dig, never reaching their goal, but instead taking a detour where they become forever trapped inside a stalactite prison of their own fantasies.
Bucking Fastard is rarely boring, and delivers genuine laughs, but it loses its way early on. Peter Zeitlinger’s camera feels happy and energetic, and the image looks beautiful. Kate and Rooney Mara do an excellent job with this rather fun acting exercise, but their synchronised speech is sometimes distracting, and bears down cumbersomely upon the individual performances.
Herzog has crafted an ode to earnestness, a diatribe against cynicism, and with his hammer and chisel he takes up the task of moulding a better world. However, the task, like the tunnel in the movie, proves to be Sisyphysian. Bucking Fastard is too uneven and attention deficit to find the light.
You could read that the story structure mimics the minds of the sisters as they become ever-more detached from the world around them, always dreaming of a better, imagined world far away. But even their descent is constantly hampered by continual barely-relevant tangents that persist right up to the credits. With the Halbrookes, crafted with affection, Herzog attempts to untangle us from the bramble of reality and send us on a gleaming, fantastical joyride, but the boat never makes it back to shore. Instead, we wander adrift until the bitter end. As one of the sisters’ bewildered admirers remarks, “Everything in this world confuses me.” After Bucking Fastard, we are none the wiser.
