Bucking Fastard

Bluesky

Perhaps only Werner Herzog could take an oddball story – the real-life tale of inseparable twins Greta and Freda Chaplin, who made headlines after a court case for harassing a neighbour – and make the fictionalised reimagining even odder, by making the pair at its heart merely sisters, which means their stereo speaking, identical Victorian orphan dress sense and tandem actions are somehow even more inexplicable.

Still, for all the strangeness of the premise there’s not a lot of meat on the bones of this story. If Jean and Joan Holbrooke (acting sisters Kate and Rooney Mara doing a superbly synchronised job) were a little more rakish then it would almost be a picaresque, as it begins with a court case in Ireland before looping to Dublin and then back to rural Ireland again, charting the sisters’ odd encounters along the way.

It starts at its most entertaining, with the sisters in court facing off against Gareth Mulroney (Orlando Bloom – who is Jack the lad enough for his own picaresque – with an only mildly Irish roving accent). The sisters declare themselves to be undyingly in love with him following a brief threesome fling, and they are unwilling to let anything so minor as his marriage to another woman get in the way of that.

A restraining order doesn’t stop them deciding to torch a postbox for no other reason than they believe this will stop Gareth sending letters to his wife. Or, put another way, for no other reason than Herzog wants to set up an encounter with a kind elderly gentleman (John Kavanagh), who offers them a rent-free apartment in Dublin. Encounters there continue to be odd, including with sympathetic social worker Timothy (Domhnall Gleeson, who is showing quite an aptitude for this sort of role after The Incomer), who tries to help them live more independently. Herzog nudges at something psychologically fascinating and heartfelt in these brief encounters, particularly when the pair visit their parents’ home, and there’s a touching element to the sisters’ closeness, which they can neither explain nor extricate themselves from. Sadly, the writer/director is less interested in taking a deep dive into that than he is in just putting this odd couple in strange situations.

Out of the blue, which is the way everything happens in Bucking Fastard, their aunt (Marion O'Dwyer) invites them to live with her and it’s here the film takes on a melancholic fable-like quality as the sisters decide to dig a tunnel towards what the believe will be their own Shangri-la. Follies have always been of interest to Herzog, whether it's hefting a steamship over a hill (Fitzcarraldo) or attempting to live with dangerous bears as though they are humans (Grizzly Man). Here the ‘folly’ is of a more whimsical and melancholy kind that becomes a sort of ode to loneliness in a crowd of two. There are some beautifully observed fanciful moments: the skittering, off-kilter scoring from Ernst Reijseger that seems endlessly inventive, a fox as a pet and cave photography from Peter Zeitlinger that has the same mythical feel as that he achieved in Cave Of Forgotten Dreams. However, Herzog’s constant, and unusual for him, unquestioning sympathy towards his protagonists means this becomes something of a whimsy tolerance test by the time it draws to its odd and sudden stop.

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