Schultze Gets the Blues (2003)
Directed by Michael Schorr
Paramount Classics, 114 minutes, PG
In German (subtitles) and English
★★★
I am fond of offbeat
films and have sought them during quarantine. Schultze Gets the Blues
won’t be everybody’s slice of schnitzel, but it is certainly quirky. I
watched it mostly because its description evoked James Kelman’s Dirt Road,
a novel in which a lad becomes obsessed with Cajun music. Schultze is like
that, but with a Brobdingnagian German man instead of a willowy Scottish boy.
Schultze (Horst
Krause) is a bachelor salt miner in the eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt. To
call his life routine is an understatement. Each day he pedals his bicycle–no
easy feat for a man as rotund as he–across the flat marshy landscape and always
manages to arrive at the rail crossing in time for the gate to come down and a
train to pass. He and other workers then sit at the crossing and ring their
bike bells impatiently when the crossing gate tender is slow to raise it. (None
would dare simply ride around the barrier. That would be too disorderly.) Each
day Schultze dons slip-on shoes to go outside and then carefully exchanges them
for scuff style slippers when he comes into the house to cook, watch TV, listen
to the radio, or pick up his button box to squeeze out a tune. As Kurt Vonnegut
would have said, an so it goes.
We come in on Horst
as he works his last shift and his two friends, Jurgen and Manfred, are being
laid off. Each is given a parting gift: a large plug-in lamp in the
shape of a salt nugget! What next? What indeed. Schultze’s certainly not ready
to hang out in the spartan community hall where old guys argue over chess moves
but on the other hand, changes such as the sassy new waitress as the local café
unnerve him. Schultze is your basic pear-shaped silent type. He’s a respected local
accordionist famed for a particular polka that he plays at the annual musikverein
(music society) gala–just as his father had done.
One day, though, Schultze
hears a snatch of Zydeco accordion from a radio show about Louisiana. It
becomes his earworm and, courtesy of the waitress who feels sorry for him and
gives him a book on Louisiana, bayou culture becomes an obsession. He even gets
a cookbook and prepares jambalaya for Jurgen and Manfred. They’re reluctant
converts but are well ahead of the curve; most locals are shocked when he plays
what he knows of the Zydeco tune at the gala. If you like droll humor, the
concert hall scenes are a hoot. Although the event couldn’t be more stereotypically
German, attendees are inexplicably dressed in costumes. Schultze looks like a toreador
crossed with a mutant ant.
Still, thanks to
the kindness of the wives of Jurgen and Manfred, Schultze is chosen to travel
to his town’s sister city in America: New Braunfels, Texas. It’s a real place that
was largely settled by German immigrants in the 1840s. Schultze is not exactly
the jetsetter type, but he makes his way to New Braunfels’ annual German
festival. As he sits in the wings awaiting his turn to entertain Texans in
lederhosen, he just shakes his head, picks up his accordion, and walks away. Texas
is just as dull as his hometown, except he doesn’t understand what anyone is
saying! We next see him in an unseaworthy small boat cruising down rivers and through
bayous on his way to Nowhere in Particular, Louisiana. Though he speaks almost no
English, Schultze is on a voyage of discovery and fate.
Schultze gets
the Blues is billed as musical
comedy and I guess that will do for a label. It has the pacing of Jim Jarmusch films
such as Stranger Than Paradise and Mystery Train. Like those films,
the humor is layered with irony and absurdity and you must be patient. In order
to get inside the head of an inexpressive man who has grown bored, one must
show boredom. The best way is to shoot a film that’s as languid as its main
character. At its best, Schultze Gets the Blues is unhurried in a painterly
way. The bayou only comes in two flavors: lush, dripping with Spanish moss, and
creepy; or a flat and featureless landscape in which there’s a whole lot of
horizon.
Krause is well cast
as a passive foil drifting to whatever lies around the next bend–an observer
who isn’t on any sort of mission. This was director Michael Schorr’s first film
and he lets his landscapes etch themselves upon the characters. No one does
much; they simply exist within those environments until the day in which they are
gobbled up by them. Schorr won a best director award at a Stockholm film
festival in 2004, and that also makes me laugh, as Schultze has all of
the earmarks of a first film, including some fairly major obvious continuity errors.
It is a classic blows hot-blows-cold movie, but because it’s so out of the
ordinary, I liked it. It’s not great cinema, but if you’ve seen Jarmusch’s Stranger
Than Paradise, picture his shots of frozen Lake Erie, bake them in a Louisiana
sun, and you’ve got Schorr’s bayou. The final scene also has a splash of
Bergman-like absurdity á la The Seventh Seal.
Rob Weir
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