My Best Fiend film review

LONELY WALKER'S REVIEW

It would have been difficult to squeeze another laugh out of this film. Odd, considering that it is not the latest Jim Carrey or Eddie Murphy feature, not even a laughably bad action movie. My Best Fiend is a documentary, but one further away from the usual "Hey! A gorilla!" fodder than Edinburgh at festival time is from Edinburgh the other 11 months of the year. Despite the foreboding facts of this being one of many films shown at the EIFF this year as part of an epic Werner Herzog retrospective and the exceptionally boring talk given before the film, it soon became clear that a complete critical knowledge of Herzog's career was more or less completely unnecessary. A big relief for this writer, I can tell you, who would not have recognised Werner Herzog if he had been sitting next to me.

My Best Fiend's subject matter sounds deceptively simple - a reminiscence of Herzog's collaborations with his favoured leading man, Klaus Kinski - but quickly degenerates from this lofty academic perch into descriptions of their varied and evidently not-very-successful attempts to kill each other. Herzog, who directs and presents this documentary feature, starts his travels in Munich. At the apartment he used to share with Kinski, he regales the couple who now own the flat with tales of Kinski's penchant for running into doors and living in a cupboard.

As the film continues into the Amazonian jungle and the locations for Aguirre, Wrath Of God and Fitzcarraldo, the main question brought to mind is whether Kinski's constant tantrums were signs of actual madness, or just him playing the role of "the star". Where madness is concerned, the conditions undergone by the cast and crew of these films were evidently above and beyond what any modern Hollywood or even European crew would undergo. Herzog relates spending many of his nights in the hut of an Indian woman and her nine children who kept Guinea pigs to eat. Kinski lived in a tent, wanting to be closer to nature, but caused havoc when it became evident that this accommodation was less than waterproof. Kinski's antics on set ranged from picking arguments about the food to shooting into a tent packed with Indian extras. The actor seemed to find at least one reason per day to quit each and every film he made, something Herzog finally found a solution to when he threatened to fetch his rifle and put eight rounds into Kinski's head before he made it out of range down the river. Kinski was consequently on his best behaviour.

My Best Fiend, apart from documenting the Kinski-Herzog love/hate relationship, is also a fascinating behind the scenes look at several of their films. On Fitzcarraldo, the crew had to film several difficult scenes onboard a boat on the Amazon. While the boat was secured with steel cables, the water level kept rising, snapping cables and putting the crew in some danger. Eventually Herzog persuaded a very few volunteers to go onboard the beleaguered ship and finish the film. Kinski uncharacteristically went along with them. In footage which probably surpasses a lot of the finished film, the boat crashes into the rocks, splitting a cameraman's hand and sending Kinski, Herzog and the rest of the crew into nervous laughter.

While Kinski's sanity may be in doubt for much of this film, from an artistic and technical point of view he is only described in the positive sense. Herzog describes Kinski's autobiography as "purely fictional", showing their relationship as severely strained because Kinski believed (probably correctly) that if he wrote the truth, no one would buy it. It seems that Herzog and Kinski were exactly as crazy as each other, and therefore the best of... Friends? Fiends? It is a great pity that Kinski could not contribute his opinion to the film, but he is the dominating presence in it, and this is a fitting tribute to a man who was, and remains, a colourful presence in film.

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