Schultze Gets the Blues
dir. Michael Schorr
Opens Fri March 18.

Just when you think Europe has run out of colorfully sad loners to build interesting allegories about the inexorable march of Americanization around, along comes Schultze, a porcine Kraut from a tiny village in the former East Germany. After being prematurely retired, sad, silent Schultze has nothing to look forward to but lonely nights spent cooking for one (and sometimes three, if you count his quarrelsome friends), drinking beer from huge bottles, and practicing the turgid waltz his father taught him on the accordion. Then, one night, while flipping around the radio dial, something remarkable happens: He hears a zydeco song. Captivated by this utterly alien music, he reproduces it perfectly, and can't bring himself to play, or listen to, anything else. This causes problems at his traditional music club, since he is expected to play his famous waltz at their annual festival. A minor scandal ensues, but he's still selected to represent the club at a similar festival in a tiny Texas Podunk--his village's sister city. That's the first hour. What happens when our hero gets to America is essentially a whole other film, one that's twice as rewarding as the already brilliant one that leads up to it. The twists of plot are central to the richness, but suffice it to say that before long, Schultze is doing a bit of a Huck Finn, on an American river that looks less molested by globalization than most of Europe.

Because so much of the film centers on the encroachment of Western ideas onto traditional European modes of living (it wasn't so long ago that the very idea of American music being available on East German radio was unthinkable) it's refreshing that director Schorr allows his pilgrim's progress to unfold with ambivalence. There are no screeds here, just some very pointed, poignant observations about the slow death of the old way, already in progress.