October 2, 2002

By Dennis Harvey

NOW REGARDED AS an oasis of rugged individualism, American cinema in the 1970s didn't impress anyone that way then; rather, it seemed chaotic, even a little forlorn. While some important movies got their recognition right away (the Godfathers, Taxi Driver, Nashville), most of those adored later on were greeted with mixed reviews and little or no audience interest. For serious viewers the frontier worthy of real excitement was – of all places – Germany, which hadn't had a film industry worth noticing since the 1930s. Almost perfectly contained within the decade, New German Cinema (West German, that is) had everything: austerity, formal beauty, enigmatic depths, strong auteurist stamps, alienation themes, acknowledgment of the cinematic past, an utterly alien-to-Hollywood vibe even when at its most referential (as in Fassbinder's Sirkian soap operas). These were movies that by definition could never be truly "popular," but for a while they were awaited with held breath – as the new Antonioni, Bergman, or Fellini had been one decade before – in art houses everywhere.

As mysteriously as they'd arrived, the school's leading lights flamed out, dimmed, or went gaga in the '80s. Fassbinder, of course, imploded – a chemically bloated corpse at age 36. Wim Wenders did the unhappy-Hollywood-sojourn thing, then reemerged as a jet-setting pasha whose New Ageism got old fast. Werner Herzog apotheosized his own Don Quixote reputation as a noble/foolhardy pursuer of impossible movies with Fitzcarraldo, but some spell was broken when the film itself emerged less interesting than the making-of about it (Les Blank's Burden of Dreams). Thereafter his narrative features became few and his nonfiction efforts more frequent and extraordinary. 1992's Lessons of Darkness, capturing Kuwaiti oil fields in apocalyptic flame, is one of the great films of the last decade.

Invincible comes as a surprise, then. It's a European coproduction of fairly epic proportions, a period-set parable not that far removed from the primitive wonder and morality of Heart of Glass and Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which were released more than a quarter-century ago. The new movie has been greeted with some disappointment at festivals and in European distribution; despite having Fine Line behind it, it's getting a pretty inconspicuous United States release. But there's a visionary gentleness to it that holds you even when the storytelling falters.

Set in 1932 and drawn very loosely from factual events (some of which were already dramatized in Istvan Szabo's 1988 Hanussen), Invincible has a slightly dislocated, fairy-tale air about it from the start, as virile young man Ziske (Finnish competitive bodybuilder Jouko Ahola) is established as an incongruity in his eastern Poland shtetl. The eldest son of the village blacksmith, Ziske is a mountainous man-boy liked by all but whose imposing physical strength seems to hail from another planet – it's a natural aberration that contrasts with everything else in his pious, self-effacing community.

Chance places him in the path of a talent agent touring through, and suddenly Ziske feels destiny calling him elsewhere. He travels to Berlin, gaining employment at the theater of the fantastic presided over by alleged Danish aristocrat Hanussen (Tim Roth), a mesmerist and ambitious entrepreneur who has tapped into the more occult leanings of the rising Nazi zeitgeist. Ziske is hired to do a strongman act – albeit as "Siegfried," an ideal of Aryan manhood complete with blond fright wig and Tarzan-goes-Wagner duds.

His conscience, however, is made uneasy by Hanussen's crowd-pleasing exhortations against the "weak, corrupt" Jewish race, just as he is disturbed by the boss's mistreatment of mistress and orchestra pianist Marta (Anna Fourari). Before a house full of Nazi officers, Ziske finally unmasks himself as a Jew – inciting their affronted disbelief while becoming a hero to new audiences who've never had an athletic idol of their own. Of course, the history beyond this story had several years yet in which to grow darker, then black.

Invincible has stilted, borderline-silly moments, and the inexperienced Ahola can't carry scenes demanding more than natural charisma. But the somewhat naive tenor struck me as an intentional primitivism allied with Guy Maddin's quasi-creaky retro movies – amplifying its fable quality, the film seems to have been made in a vaguely familiar, long-ago era. (Some features from the actual Nazi period have the same quality, a watery simplicity pickled by the industry's wartime isolation.) The period details are delightful (especially the club's pitch-perfect musical numbers) yet dreamy and unsettled, like a troubled nap from which our big, buffed Pillsbury Doughboy of a man-child struggles to wake.