Der Amerikaner

A thoroughly buried hebephile bizarreness that, although released in the US in two DVD editions at the start of the millennium, the road to release is now a very thorny one. Not surprisingly, it's not far removed from nightmares in which Long Live Ghosts! descends into lurid porn to watch a horribly rumpled Bronson (he and Donner reportedly didn't get on too well during filming) being jumped on by the sixteen-year-old jail bait Susan George, who's acting like she’s ten. Twinky does, however, have one iron in the fire, namely the totally immature Donner's direction, who here, especially through editing, tries a lot of oddball techniques that mostly make no narrative or conceptual sense at all, and most likely he is using them in an attempt to smuggle a sort of sense of youthful whimsy into the film. Something like when Janák, who is thirty-six years old, rejuvenated a scene in The Rafters by zooming in on the DJ with a camera that was a bit crooked. Donner gets it right here once (the dialogue at the crosswalk with passing cars), the rest of the time you stare at it in confusion like you're watching Last Year at Marienbad. (14.01.2021)