To put it mildly, Werner Herzog has his own take on things, so it comes as no surprise that one of the most recent projects by the prolific international director does not follow the rules of normal political biography. Over a six-month period, and without a prepared script, Herzog conducted three interviews with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that covered a multitude of topics, some of it geopolitical, much of it personal, and more than a little of it highly idiosyncratic. That’s not to say Herzog takes his subject lightly: Gorbachev was instrumental in German reunification in the late 1980s, a subject very close to the Munich-born director’s heart, and this issue is raised in a film that covers a lot of ground, from Gorbachev’s rise in the Communist Party, to dealing with the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, to negotiating with U.S. President Ronald Reagan over the nuclear arms race,...
- 10/27/2018
- by Damon Wise
- Variety Film + TV
Herzog meets Gorbachev, or should that be the other way round, in an encounter that on paper should be one for the ages: Werner Herzog, the incisive documentarian (here in tandem with frequent co-director André Singer), engaged in a meeting of minds with as robust a subject as Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, architect of Perestroika and Glasnost and the eighth and last leader of the Soviet Union. But the interview, which happened over three shorter sessions and is interspersed with standard archive footage and a few other talking heads, finds Herzog on unusually obsequious, almost fanboyish form, his (very natural) admiration for Gorbachev dulling the edge of his more eccentric instincts.
To be fair, the great German filmmaker tries to bend the encounter to his will, but he’s almost immediately shut down by Gorbachev who is having none of his Herzogian shenanigans and proves consistently resistant (though genially so) to...
To be fair, the great German filmmaker tries to bend the encounter to his will, but he’s almost immediately shut down by Gorbachev who is having none of his Herzogian shenanigans and proves consistently resistant (though genially so) to...
- 9/21/2018
- by Jessica Kiang
- Variety Film + TV
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