‘Bucking Fastard’ Festival Review: The Mara Sisters Perform A Feat Of Synchronized Acting In Werner Herzog’s Surrealist Fable

The dedication to David Lynch that opens Bucking Fastard, Werner Herzog’s new film, is not only a tribute but a kind of disclaimer. From here on, the German director seems to be saying, anything can happen: a filmmaker is entitled to follow wherever his inspiration fires, and the viewer is free to take it or leave it. And that, in the end, is what Herzog’s new film offers — a loose, playful trip into the minds of its two protagonists, a surrealist fable about the two strangest sisters ever to walk the earth.

Rooney and Kate Mara play the sisters, who are not twins (the film is careful to say so), though the symbiosis between them is such that they might as well be a single person. Freely inspired by the real case of Freda and Greta Chaplin — who were twins, and who achieved a measure of tabloid fame in 1980s England — the Holbrooke sisters operate almost like one body with two talking heads. It isn’t that they complete each other, or that one finishes the other’s sentences: they say the same thing at the same time, a single voice speaking in unison, as if the thoughts were issuing from one mind.

In the fiction, the story unfolds in present-day Ireland, but it could just as easily take place anywhere, at any time. Jeanie and Joanie Holbrooke (Kate and Rooney) first appear in a courtroom, accused by a man (Orlando Bloom) who made them both fall in love with him, then cast them aside, unleashing a ferocious appetite for revenge. The lovestruck Holbrooke girls are thus forced to defend themselves for having loved too much a man who cannot begin to grasp why they keep coming after him. But the sisters act, and they live inside their own universe. Nobody can persuade them that they did anything wrong. Love, as they see it, doesn’t require much in the way of explanation.

The rest of the film follows the assorted misadventures of these two sisters, who can’t bring themselves to separate even long enough to vacuum the living room floor. Along the way they run into characters even stranger than they are: some who want to help them past their difficulties (Domhnall Gleeson’s, for one), others who don’t understand them at all, plenty who mock their peculiarities, and a few who spot an opportunity in the fact that, beyond being very odd, both women appear to possess highly developed — and barely repressed — sexual instincts and appetites.

The most striking thing here — beyond the bizarre escapades the sisters get themselves into in pursuit of what they take to be a lost paradise — is the sheer mechanics of what the Mara sisters are doing: performing the same actions and lines at the same moment for the length of a feature, a kind of synchronized swimming of acting that is fiendishly difficult to execute and that produces a genuinely strange effect on anyone watching. Yes, their lines occasionally cross and pull apart, but most of the time the two function like an AI in two voices: an actress in stereo, a hive mind shared by a pair of performers. Even so, you can pick up small differences between one and the other.

In any case, and quite apart from the acrobatic performance style of its leads, Bucking Fastard asks the viewer to give in to the invention, the incident, the oddity of whatever circumstance the sisters stumble into next. By the end, once the film has reached territory — mental and geographical alike — that nobody could have anticipated, you may well wonder what exactly you have just seen. It doesn’t call for much analysis or explanation. At best, one can venture that this is a film about two outsiders who, like most protagonists in Herzog’s cinema, are looking for the one place in the world where they can be who they are without being stared at as freaks. And off this extravagant film by the great German director goes, on a surreal journey his friend Lynch would surely have approved of.