“HAPPY PEOPLE: A YEAR IN THE TAIGA ” My rating: B (Opening March 22 at the Tivoli)
95 minutes | No MPAA rating
In recent years filmmaker Werner Herzog has gravitated toward documentaries dealing with man’s relationship to nature: “Grizzly Man” about an eccentric eaten by the wild bears he adored, “Encounters at the End of the World” about the snowbound residents of an Antarctic research station…even “Cavern of Forgotten Dreams” about cave paintings left behind by Stone Age artists.
“Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” seems to fit nicely among those other titles, but in fact it’s a weird hybrid.
This 90-minute film about the residents of a remote Siberian village was fashioned by Herzog from a four-hour Russian TV documentary directed by Dmitry Vasyukov. With Vasyukov’s input Herzog wrote his own English narration and re-edited scenes without ever setting foot in Siberia.
How closely this film hews to the Russian original is anybody’s guess. At some later date scholars may have a heyday comparing the two to show how even documentary footage can be molded to serve a filmmaker’s intent.
Any way you slice it, though, it’s an effective example of the ethnology documentary.
“Happy People” focuses on Bakhta, a burg of 300 souls so remote it can be reached only by aircraft or (during the brief summer) river boat.
The film’s title notwithstanding, not everyone in Bakhta is happy. Certainly not the indigenous folk who must contend with widespread alcoholism and lives of menial labor. Continue Reading »
