Kate and Rooney Mara give a single, intricately virtuosic performance speaking and acting in perfect concert that cannot quite unify the great German eccentric's cluttered, ripely bonkers fantasia.
Plus IconJessica Kiang
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Courtesy of Gateway to Orkney, Venice Film Festival Occasionally sublime, often ridiculous and always extravagantly weird, Werner Herzog‘s “Bucking Fastard,” unlike its gorgeously interlinked protagonists, is a film of multiple personalities that only rarely speak in unison. Kate and Rooney Mara, appearing together — oh so together — for the first time, are endlessly fascinating playing two sisters who speak and react simultaneously and identically, less a pair of people than a palimpsest of a single person. This unprecedented duality is not simply a casting and acting coup, it is rich with potential meaning and mood: there is something inexpressibly sad and beautiful about the ideas it prompts, about the loneliness of the human condition, about the polite savagery of society towards its outliers, about the nature of kinship and whether it’s possible — and maybe even enviable — for two people to share one soul, the way they might share a teapot.
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