Werner
Herzog is a modern-day adventurer who travels to the remote corners of the
globe to make eccentric films and documentaries on-location. However, he
perhaps spent too much time in the sun without his pith helmet while shooting
amid Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni salt flats. Perhaps the film he brought back
makes sense to him, but everyone else will be completely baffled by Salt and Fire (trailer here), which opens today
in Los Angeles.
Laura
Somerfeld and her two busybody UN ecologist colleagues have been kidnapped by
masked gunmen, but before we get much further, let’s flashback to see if they
had a pleasant flight to the unnamed country bearing a strong resemblance to
Bolivia. They have come to collect data on the disastrous El Diablo Blanco
(that means “White Devil”) salt lake. Before they can even start, they are
kidnapped by Matt Riley, the CEO of the energy consortium cleverly known as “The
Consortium” (which sounds only slightly less sinister than the “Cabal”), who
were responsible for the disaster. Does he want to stop them from filing their
paperwork? No, apparently, he just wants to recite dramatic monologues for
Somerfeld.
As
they work their way through Ecclesiastics quotations and renaissance art
analysis, a strange Stockholm Syndrome-esque attraction grows between Somerfeld
and Riley, until he up-and-strands her in the middle of White Devil Lake with
two weeks-worth of supplies and two young legally blind indigenous brothers to
care for.
If
you think S&F sounds ludicrous,
wait till you get a load of the outrageously stilted dialogue. Think of it as a
film that combines the worst eccentricities of Eugène Green and … well, Werner
Herzog. In terms of credible motivation, this film is an absolute train wreck—so
much so, cult movie fans will be rubbernecking at its weird procession of non-sequiturs
in slack-jawed bemusement for years to come. Herzog unsubtly goes for broke
trying to invest the film with Biblical significance. Truly, in the Land of
Salt, the nearly blind are just as confused as the rest of us.
One
thing is for certain—you can’t fault Michael Shannon for a lack of trying. He struts
about wearing his leather jacket in the desert and inveighing to the high
heavens like a prophet in the wilderness. Veronica Ferres looks a little
freaked out as Somerfeld, which in all likelihood she was. However, Gael García
Bernal and Volker Michalowski are just cringe-inducingly embarrassing as the
ineffectual Doctors Cavani and Meier, whom Riley deviously sidelines with nasty
bouts of Montezuma’s revenge.
