About Schultze
German retiree finds his bliss in whimsical "Schultze Gets the Blues"

A big-hearted performance by deadpan character actor Horst Krause gives the offbeat German film Schultze Gets The Blues its soulful and whimsical center. The first dramatic feature from writer-director Michael Schorr, it's a gentle, if sometimes problematic fable about embracing your bliss, wherever and whenever you find it.

Krause stars as Schultze (he doesn't seem to have a first name), a heavy-set, middle-aged salt miner with a buzz cut, a doughy baby face, and a battered old fedora he's always popping off his head as a gesture of humble respect. Forced to retire from the mine, Schultze and his two buddies, Jurgen (Harald Warmbraun), and Manfred (Karl-Fred Muller), spend their newfound free time in idle, empty routine, at home, and in the village pub. The others have wives, but Schultze lives alone, makes dutiful visits to his unresponsive mother in a rest home, and belongs to a music club, where he's played the accordion all his life, like his father before him.

But one night on his kitchen radio, he tunes in something completely different—a snippet of peppy Cajun zydeco music. Unable to get the phrase of music out of his head, he grabs his accordion and recreates the notes very slowly, gradually speeding it up to fever pitch. It’s the film's best scene: Schultze's expression barely alters, yet his epiphany is profound. For the first time in his life, placid Schultze finds himself in the middle of a personal "revolution." He cooks a mess of jambalaya for his friends, and scandalizes the music club by playing zydeco, not oom-pah, at the annual beer fest. When the club sends him to a German fest at their sister city in Texas (where he finds nothing but the same beer-hall music he left back home), Schultze rents a boat and follows his muse downriver into the heart of the Louisiana bayou.

Although inventively shot, with a sense of the surprising visual poetry of everyday things, Schorr's film takes forever setting up characters and premise in the German scenes, while scenes in the American south (which feel mostly improvised) are short and fleeting. Still, while the ending feels abrupt, the movie succeeds as a fairy tale of self-discovery, buoyed up by Schorr's imaginative composition (don't miss his homage to Bergman at the very end), and Krause's endearing performance.

SCHULTZE GETS THE BLUES With Horst Krause. Written and directed by Michael Schorr. (R) 114 minutes. In German with English subtitles. (***)
Review published in Good Times, March 31, 2005