Boring, boring, boring! I just could not get into this at all. Based on Goethe's <i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>, it's about an aspiring writer who travels across West Germany with a group of artistic oddballs, comprised of a poet, an actress, a… More
Boring, boring, boring! I just could not get into this at all. Based on Goethe's <i>Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship</i>, it's about an aspiring writer who travels across West Germany with a group of artistic oddballs, comprised of a poet, an actress, a 'singer' and a mute acrobat. The film feels very stilted and artificial; it's full of pompous speeches, with hardly any dramatic content. It doesn't help that none of the artists seem to be especially talented at their chosen disciplines; maybe something is being lost in translation, but the writer and the poet's musings are self-obsessed and pretentious, the actress is not actress enough to fool the writer when she tries to pass off a piece of pure invention as a dream she had the previous night, and the self-proclaimed singer doesn't really sing, perhaps because he's invariably got a harmonica stuck in his gob. Nastassja Kinski, whose first film this was, just juggles badly and performs the odd cartwheel; if that's all it takes to be an acrobat, I'm running off to join the circus... A film about alienation, best left alone.
