Great Deals Of Schultze Gets Blues Horst Krause
See this movie. Please! Don't worry about the English subtitles, there really is not that much dialogue in the film and when Shultze does get to America, well, the Americans speak English. The images tell the story of this film even more than the words. Plus, there is an effect of not even noticing the subtitles after a couple of minutes.
This is a film about a seemingly-stolid block of man named Schultze. He is forced into early retirement from his job in the salt mines with a couple of his buddies. Since all they know is the pit, they don't handle retirement all that well. The images of the film are absolutely wonderful in showing us the deadening symmetry and regularity of their lives. One I can't help sharing with you is the cheap lamp made of rock salt they are given as their retirement gift.
They are also members of an amateur music society that is coming up on its fiftieth birthday. Schultze, like his father before him, is an accordion player, and every year he plays a polka in their presentation. However, he happens upon a radio station playing Zydeco music. This ends up changing Schultze's life forever and sets this unadventurous man on a hero's journey whose details I cannot share with you. You must see all of them for yourself. Each of the great images in this film could fill pages and pages of explanation because they are so richly conceived and yet shot with such minimal action or dialogue.
The ending of the movie left me a bit unsatisfied, but I can understand the hero's fate after he sacrifices everything to reach his final destination. However, being a musician myself, I know how much he and the other musicians would have enjoyed themselves more if a more outgoing approach had been taken - you don't need English to get other musicians to understand that you like their music and want to play with them.
However, that is a quibble. And it is wonderful how Schultze's grand adventure and his hometown buddies' misunderstanding of and projection onto the hero's adventure leads to changes in what is acceptable and what is also desirable even if symmetrical respectability still holds them in thrall.
This story of a retired German miner who becomes inspired to play zydeco music (instead of the traditional polka) on his accordion unfolds as delicately as a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. If you're the type of viewer who becomes impatient with subtle, real-time narrative, you might find it tedious. But this film is beautifully done, and even the very slow scenes are enhanced by droll sight gags and persuasive glimpses of emotion. Schultze's dreary northern German town, with its cast of mostly benign denizens, becomes utterly endearing, as are the characters Schultze encounters on his odyssey in search of zydeco. The film's great success is that we come to totally identify with the seeming "lumpenproletariat" of a protagonist as his gentle and poetic soul is revealed. While it is brilliantly grounded in minute details, the film works beautifully as an exploration of the individual's quest for self-realization and artistic expression. And indeed, though it keeps its focus modest and does not overtly address the "big questions," the film offers a more sophisticated meditation on spirituality than many others that try a lot harder.
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