Grave New World

By J.C.

EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL

Directed and Written by WERNER HERZOG

Can Franc,ois Truffaut really have said, as the ads claim, that Werner Herzog is "the most important living director of our time"? It must be either a practical joke or an act of untoward largesse.

It turns out to be neither--just a misquote which, Truffaut states politely, "will no longer appear." Every Man for Himself and God Against All does recall Truffaut in the same way that a color-by-the-numbers painting recalls Cezanne. Based on the history of a young man who appeared in the Germany of the 1820s with no memory and no experience of the world, the movie is a clanking exposition of a theme Truffaut himself explored in The Wild Child (1970). Truffaut's film was full of compassion and intelligence, a scrupulous study of freedom and the sometimes questionable requirements of the "civilizing process." Every Man, a prizewinner at this year's Cannes Festival, is a casebook of insensitivity. Every character is vigorously and grossly caricatured. The short supply of ideas is presented with all the insight of a caption in Ripley's Believe It or Not!

Herzog, 33, is a sort of social anthropologist manque who has been prominent in the perennially fizzling resurgence of the West German cinema. It has been suggested that in Every Man Herzog is struggling to create a new metaphor for the state of modern Germany. This is one of those facile, cover all apologies, like saying an Italian film is a thinly disguised attack on the Roman Catholic Church, or a novel about contemporary Ireland reflects the agonies of civil war. It cannot save the movie from indistinction.

There is one bit of novelty in Every Man. The actor who plays Kaspar Hauser, the lead role, is billed only as "Bruno S." "S." was plucked by Director Herzog from an asylum be cause his own case history paralleled the Hauser story so closely. Such a stroke of casting is consistent with Herzog's previous work, which includes a film entirely populated by dwarfs. These works were also defended as metaphors for modern Germany. Some fresh excuses are needed.

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