'Bucking Fastard' Review
Release Date: --/--/-- [Festival Run]
Genre: Drama.
MPAA: Not Rated.
The Verdict: A Maybe
I believe sibling telepathy exists in some capacity. I have a little sister, and sometimes I look at her, she looks at me, and we don’t even have to say anything. Bucking Fastard, Werner Herzog’s first narrative feature since 2019, takes the idea of sibling connection to an extreme. This is an odd and quirky film about a one-of-a-kind sibling love, a somewhat based-on-fact story about two sisters who physically and emotionally can’t do anything independently of each other, embodied by two real-life sisters cast together for the first time.
Rooney Mara is Joan Holbrooke. Kate Mara is Jean Holbrooke. The sisters make a point of emphasizing that they are not twins, only sisters, but they might as well be clones in the way they act. All their clothes match; they walk arm in arm to every function; they speak in unison, and they even do menial tasks together, like holding the key with one hand each to unlock the front door of their apartment. They also fall in love, always with the same man. Bucking Fastard starts in court, with the two women facing restraining orders from Gareth Mulroney (a silly Orlando Bloom), the handsome Irish neighbor who seduced both of them, then tried to discard them for his wife. He literally arrives in their lives like a drunken angel, stumbling into a church mid-mass with a pint in his grip. The girls are not exactly the most stable duo and don’t take rejection well, eventually harassing him and destroying his property. This part of the story is loosely based on real life, as Herzog modeled the Holbrooke sisters after the discipline of English twins Freda and Greta Chaplin in the 1980s.
What the Mara sisters are doing in Bucking Fastard might seem simple to the untrained eye, but you should try to coordinate this kind of timing with someone else, even someone as close to you as a relative or best friend, and see what happens. Odds are that even if you two know the lines, it’s going to take a couple of attempts and a few rehearsals to nail it. Now imagine doing that for nearly two hours' worth of dialogue, and Herzog gives the sisters no shortage of lines. There is real artistry in the way they synchronize, and it is never less than wildly amusing and eerie. It also makes the sparse moments when they separate their thoughts, or at least complete each other’s sentences, even more jarring.
The best moments of the film come from the parts where the sisters are challenged to try and become individuals. Domhnall Gleeson plays a government employee with the exacting task of getting these two women to think for themselves. He coaches them through simple tasks, like letting go of the vacuum handle so they can fit through tight spaces or using a ticketing machine so they don’t double-click and cause malfunctions. The absurdity in this ordinary life is when Bucking Fastard best embraces the quirky nature of its premise.
All of this performance art is quite cool, but what exactly is it meant to convey beyond enjoyable gimmickry? Bucking Fastard is basically episodic, as the Holbrooke sisters travel from Irish town to Irish town, coping with the sometimes confused, sometimes threatening stares that their peculiar behavior invites. They insist they’re living in love and desperate to be in love, which gives the film an unexpected romantic spirit. The film’s various settings, particularly the beautiful Irish countryside that backdrops the latter part of the film, feel like places where the people are sparse. This adds to the loneliness we know they feel, despite the kinship they share.
The sisters are rejected in many spaces, including one heartbreaking moment when their own parents refuse to open the door for them. Sometimes they act out with malevolence, as they do towards Gareth when he takes advantage of them. Other times, they are defeated and desperate to find their place in the universe. “There must be a place for us somewhere,” they lament late in the film, which leads them to spend a long time searching not just for another life, but another world.
Most of my experience with Herzog comes from his documentary filmmaking. Though it is obviously more surreal than any of his true-life pictures, Bucking Fastard is not too far off from those movies in how it reads and reacts to the sisters’ behavior. That works for nonfiction, but this approach makes this film feel listless. The final third of the film is the most perplexing section. It almost feels like we lose track of the sisters and become embroiled in the drama of this countryside town, particularly a rampage against foxes that I struggled to care much about. We lose a lot of the camp of the first two-thirds, and the way the film ends is so abrupt that it feels like Herzog is pulling a mean practical joke on his characters and his audience.
It didn’t feel like there was enough interesting writing here to make Bucking Fastard the kind of feature-length cult classic it so obviously aspires to be (not to imply Herzog cares about that kind of stuff). It certainly gets your attention and is worth a watch if you are interested in the hook and the chance to see these two sisters together for the first time. As a meditation on loneliness and our place in the universe, it only partially succeeds.
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