English title: Why Does Herr R. Run Amok?
A middle-class man, with a good-looking wife and a son, leads a mediocre life, dealing with pressures to get ahead professionally and other annoying features of social life among colleagues, relatives and neighbors. He shows no signs of psychological imbalance, until one day...
I was unsure whether to put a "spoiler" alert on top of this review, but decided it would make no sense, given that the film's title is a spoiler in itself. As reported by a cast member, this was mostly (or totally) improvised without a written script. And it mostly succeeds at achieving a reality look. Of course a film is always just a film, and manipulation is inevitable. I guess the film's main virtue is to work as a snapshot of early 1970s' zeitgeist, with capitalism taking over from the libertarian dreams of the 1960s. We see some reviews calling it "nihilistic", but this is probably coming from people who have no idea what those times felt like. Anyway, that kind of mood seems to be gone, which does not mean that new problems haven't appeared. A curious detail is that two writer-directors are credited, one much more famous than the other, but it seems established that the more famous one had absolutely nothing to do with the making of the movie.
Rating: 56
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