Dutch actor, Rutger Hauer plays the role of a Catholic-Pole and tramp - Andreas Kartack, living in penury in a a timeless Paris. He is approached by a generous dapper gentleman (English actor Anthony Quayle) who gives him 200 francs as long as he donates part of it to a local chapel. An ex-coal miner, in appearance, Kartack sports 'over the ears' wavy fair hair, rheumy eyes, a thin moustache and those tell-tale signs of the coal-mining trade - a rough tough job to say the least- a flat-cap and coal-dust underneath his fingernails. There are shots of him in a Polish mine-shaft and pit-village in an earlier life. He finds work, the company of women and companionship with fellow Poles but is let down by his alcoholism if not sense of stupidity. Based on Lemberg-born Jewish writer Joseph Roth's novel, why the film is poignant is hard to describe - perhaps relating to Slavs/East Europeans exiled from their homelands. The film has a rich spiritual feel, in fact it has that sense of art and spirituality seen in Dostoyevsky's novel, 'The Idiot' featuring the saintly epileptic Prince Leo or Tarkovsky's moving, 'Nostalghia' (1983). Paris seems like an organically glamourous city . For me, this is Hauer's finest performance after his role as the fair-haired French free spirit, Claude Maillot-Van Horn in Roeg's 'Eureka' (1983).
Review of The Legend of the Holy Drinker
