Growing older has its pleasures. I was bit nervous about renting Fitzcarraldo (1982) with Klaus Kinski in the lead role. I remember seeing Kinski as a teenager in a film depicting a strange riverboat trip.  At the time I thought the film was boring and Kinski crazy. In my memory the action took place on the Nile, but after searching for any evidence of the film on the Internet this morning, I am forced to conclude: It was Fitzcarraldo that the teenage me rejected as boring and crazy. The adult me, by contrast, enjoyed every single one of the 158 minutes in which a lovable crazy Fitzcarraldo (Klaus Kinski) tries to bring opera to the backwaters of Peru. This film,  set at the turn of the 20th century, is not for everyone, especially not teenagers who will find the pace too slow.  If you like opera, nature, and people who are a bit crazy in their quest to experience life in its fullest, you will not be disappointed.

Werner Herzog directs the camera very differently than a typical Hollywood action movie. Instead of quickly changing from one perspective to the next, he keeps the camera still in one position until the action moves out of the frame. This is how the world appears to our eyes in real life.  As a consequence, you feel as if you are taking a real journey into the jungle of the Amazon. If you, like me, have never been in South America, every minute is an adventure, particularly when you meet the Indians, who have a solid reputation for killing white men who come into their territory. The film is a wonderful allegory for the collision of western high culture (opera) with primitive life or, more generally, modern life with our stone-age biological desires.