If someone’s going to recut your lengthy ethnographic documentary into something punchy and mythic, it might as well be Werner Herzog. Herzog takes co-directing credit for “Happy People: A Year In The Taiga,” with Dmitry Vasyukov, whose 2010 original, made for television, ran about four hours. Herzog, happily shrugging on the burden of dreams of others, narrates the survey of Siberian fur trappers a few hundred miles out into snowy nowhere, who also know their way around a bear. Herzog’s ruminations, romancing the Anglophone, are heavy on his usual wayward poetry. Plus, he likes the dogs as much as Vasyukov did. Oh! The dogs. 94m. (Ray Pride)
“Happy People: A Year In The Taiga” opens Friday at the Music Box. The trailer is below.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s Senior Editor and Film Critic. He is a contributing editor of Filmmaker magazine.
Ray’s history of Chicago Ghost Signs is planned for publication next year. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram. More photography on Instagram.
Talking Screens, December 16-22, 2022: "All The Beauty and The Bloodshed" is One of the Year's Finest | "Bardo" is a Small Story Told on an… "Avatar: The Way of Water," "All The Beauty and The Bloodshed," "The Volcano: Rescue From Whakaari" and "Bardo." PLUS: Bresson's "Au Hasard Balthazar," Andersson's "About Endlessless"; FACETS' "Holiday Detour" series; Chicago filmmaker-in-residence Daniel Nearing's "Sister Carrie" with an orchestra at Siskel; "The Thirty-Ninth Christmas Sing-A-Long & Double Feature" at the Music Box and Music Box Of Horrors and Shudder pull…
RECOMMENDED
