User Reviews

Thought the film is a little slow at times I was struck by the small details of the film. Shultze's friends reminded me of my hometown and the folks who live and die there ..York, Pennsylvania. Many of those folks have German background as do I so maybe it's a German thing. The whole oppressive overlay of dead-end jobs in a dead town with the daily drinking to blur the boredom was much like life back home. As was the firm rejection of everyone of anything new or different, the clinging to traditional music at the festival, Shultze always living in the shadow of his father. You sensed that he suddenly woke up at the end of his life to realize he had wasted it. Yet Shultze was always a little different so I was not too surprised when he tried to get to America..his little garden of flowers and washing the gnomes next to his little old shack of a house. His attraction to the lady in the nursing home, his drive to raise money to go to Texas, only to run away when he found the same life replicated there. His trip through the bayou was like his own journey to heaven..reminded me of Being There as everything fell his way. Great filming done in this flick, the quiet scenes, the views of the country, the coal mountain against the lake, the boat trip, food for the senses as I took in the message..it's never too late to find happiness in life and how one person can touch so many. And of course the genuine kindness of strangers..which was a bit over the top as he wandered the deep south. I wonder if that would really happen in today's Texas....oh, and I loved the music!!

In Schultze Gets the Blues, an accordion playing middle-aged German man faces early retirement from the coal mine which he has worked his entire life.

The film opens with the spinning of the blades of a wind-mill. The blades slowly spin round and round. These blades are shown at various times throughout the film as a metaphor of the endless cycle of life. The film moves at a very leisurely pace as Schultze and his two friends, also newly unemployed, face a world without work. Much time is spent intentionally watching the men sit around. This may try the patience of some viewers, but like the spinning blades of the wind-mill it has a point. The mine was their life, and without it, in their small town, the men must find something else, anything else to fill their time.

Schultze plays the accordion, usually polkas,and belongs to a local music club. By chance, he hears a Cajun tune on the radio and quickly becomes interested in the music and even shakes up the 50 year music club anniversary by playing what one audience member deems "jungle music." Yes, his new love of Cajun music is not shared by his fellow members.

Nevertheless, the club awards him with a ticket to the Texas music festival the town's American sister city is sponsoring. Once their, however, Schultze begins his odyssey to locate the Louisiana Bayou country and the home of his new found love, Zydeco music.

It's really at this point that the story picks up. The humor is so droll and slow paced that by "pick up", I don't mean that it changes drastically from the first two thirds of the film, rather, Schultze begins to go on his own subtle adventures and it is gratifying to the viewer to finally see him arrive at his destination.

Schultze Gets the Blues is more about what doesn't happen then what is actually happening in this film and ultimately this man's life. Like the spinning blades, time goes on and it is the subtle changes and adventures we choose that shape our lives, and like Schultze, we never know when our time is up.

First-time director-writer Michael Schorr has made a gently idiosyncratic film that is at once bittersweet and enervating, a combination familiar to anyone acquainted with the works of filmmaker Jim Jarmusch. It feels like Schorr is indeed making a Jarmusch-like film in his gently drawn character study of Schultze, an accordion-playing German salt mine worker. What I like about Schorr's style is the naturalness with which he presents such potentially eccentric characters and also the elliptical nature of his story treatment, i.e., he lets the viewer fill in all the blanks in the storyline instead of inserting contrived plot devices to move the film along.

The plot revolves around the early retirement given to Schultze and his two beer-drinking co-workers. As the lone bachelor of the trio and caring for an ailing mother in a nursing home, Schultze is bored in his small town in Sachsen-Anhalt region of Germany. By chance, he hears a snippet of zydeco music on the radio and becomes so instantly hooked that he takes odd jobs to save up for a trip to the bayou country in Louisiana. Fate somehow works in his favor as his town's music club is having a 50th anniversary celebration, including a trip for a luckily chosen musician to the US sister city of New Braunfels, Texas. After a controversial performance of zydeco music at an otherwise all-polka concert, Schultze wins the trip and makes his way to Louisiana. There, he rents a boat, travels the bayous and meets lots of nice people along the way.

It's a sweet story that Schorr has elongated with long, establishing shots and scenes, some relatively inconsequential like the flamenco-dancing waitress, that drag on for too long, but he compensates for the most part with the sheer quirkiness of the episodic plot. The comedy is not laugh-out-loud funny (except for a bikini shot of Schultze in a Jacuzzi), but the film's observational humor brings a gentle resonance to the story. While his rotund figure and gentle manner would initially have you think he will be the reincarnation of S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall from "Casablanca", Horst Krause actually plays Schultze in quite a plain-faced manner, imbuing his character with an inarticulate, realistic humanism. Harald Warmbrunn as Jürgen and Karl-Fred Muller as Manfred lend sound comic support as Schultze's buddies. Interestingly, all the roles are filled with such natural actors that the whole venture often feels like a documentary, especially when the film comes stateside.

While I enjoyed Axel Schneppat's cinematography, I think the editing by Tina Hillmann is frankly not disciplined enough to completely pull off such a sweet-spirited parable, and from my perspective, the 114-minute film could have easily been shortened by a half-hour. After all, Schultze's journey to Louisiana doesn't happen until well after the one-hour mark. I also think that Schorr views Schultze a bit too much at arm's length and doesn't allow us to get to know him beyond the thoughtful, befuddled man that Schorr presents here. For example, there is a lovely scene near the end of the film where Schultze asks for water from a local woman cooking crabs, but it's not clear beyond her sense of giving why a bonding occurs between the two. If there is a moment of catharsis for Schultze, I'm not sure I was aware of it. The charm of the 2003 movie, however, will likely sway you if you are patient enough to absorb the deliberate pacing. The DVD's one significant extra is Schorr's detailed, informative commentary on an alternate track. He speaks in German but the English subtitles help translate his often illuminating remarks. There are three similar, German-language trailers included, as well as various previews for other Paramount Classics films.

If you like sweet-natured movies with unlikely lead characters, particularly when they find themselves breaking out of old habits, you should like the German film Schultze Gets the Blues. It's the first film from director Michael Schorr and he brings it off with style.

Herr Schultze (Horst Krause) is a heavy set man, probably in his late fifties, who with two friends has been eased into retirement at the commercial salt mine he has worked at for years. Calling Schultze portly would do poor justice to his sizable belly. He's not flabby; he's earned those inches through hard work and plenty of beer. He lives alone and has never thought much about fancy ideas like life. Now, he takes afternoon naps, drinks beer with his two friends, washes his garden trolls and continues to play the accordion at polka parties. He's a slow moving, slow talking, deliberate man. Life is just there, nothing is happening in it, and Schultze is slowly being bored to death without realizing it. He just continues to take each day at its own pace.

Then one night he turns the radio dial at home and suddenly hears a fast, strange style of accordion playing he's never heard before. He's come across a broadcast of Louisiana zydeco music. He listens, puzzled. He turns the radio off and starts to go back to bed, then turns and switches the music on again. He listens some more. He tries to figure out the music he's listening to. He turns the radio off again, heads back to bed, but then stops and puts on his accordion. He picks out the tune, then plays it faster and faster, trying to match the zydeco beat. Herr Schultze doesn't know it yet but he has just changed his life.

Before long Schultze is playing his zydeco song before puzzled polka audiences. He finds a recipe for jambalaya and cooks it for his two best friends, who've never had such a spicy dish before. Schultze smiles approvingly as they keep eating and drink more beer. He gets part time jobs to earn money for a trip to bayou country in the States. And he wins a contest which will give him enough money to go to his town's sister city in America, New Braunfels, Texas, to compete in a music festival. Schultze gets there, listens to the others and realizes he's out of his league. Instead of going home to spend more time polishing the garden gnomes and taking naps in the afternoon, he buys a small blue boat with an enclosed cabin and sets out from coastal Texas into Louisiana bayou territory. Schultze can speak probably no more than a dozen words of English. He also is one of the most sincere, innocent and non-threatening people you'll ever meet. Schultze meets people he never thought of meeting yet somehow always wanted to. Old men playing dominos in a friendly bar in Moulton, Texas. A Czech band made up of cheerful Americans on the Texas gulf coast. Middle-aged cajuns dancing to a zydeco beat in a bayou bar. A woman and her daughter on a boat who give him a glass of water and invite him to stay for a creole lunch of crab and shrimp. The postcards and pictures he sends back to his friends bemuse them. Schultze also finds a contentment that we share with him.

The movie takes its time. There is no flashy cutting. The director isn't afraid of setting up his camera and simply letting a scene unfold. The first half of the movie when Schultze is at his home can sometimes seem as slow-moving as Schultze himself, but stay with it. Once you get into the rhythm of the movie, it works. There is little dialogue, especially when Schultze gets to Texas, just the efforts of a well-meaning man to be understood, and of the efforts of well-meaning Texans, Creoles and Cajuns to understand him. The movie has a dead-pan sense of humor about it at times. It can be poignant but it's not sad. And even the ending is not too sentimental. The movie is well photographed, especially the long, gray days in Schultze's home town and the lush, bayou landscapes that make up the last half of the film.

"Schutlze gets the blues" has a promising premise but at least Americans not well versed in German culture and language, you will have to fill in a lot of gaps. You will have to make a lot of assumptions as to what is happening in the story, for the director much less the dialog will not give you many clues. In some ways I really liked the film, but the pacing was trying (and I am not an action movie person). Several scenes would have an off-screen person or activity that was central to the moment, and there would be this slow pan from the current subject to the off-screen one... often making you feel like there is going to some big build up... and nothing comes from it. I know some will say that is exactly what the director wanted to happen, and it matches Thoureau's "quiet lives of desperation" theme, but I found it distracting in the end. In fact, supposedly a big transformation occurs when he hears Zydeco music but it is up to the audience to determine this and with the small exception of a dialog with a doctor and his inability to stay focused on his "previous life" polka music without shifting to "new life" Zydeco music, I had a hard time deciding whether he was bored with life and looking for something different, or somehow consumed with a new passion in his later years of life. Any visible positive character transformation for a new "loud life of hope and excitement", came very little and very late in the movie.

I wish there was little less abstracted stills and slow pacing of camera movements, for a little more directness and some more gap filling cues from the director. I would like to give this more stars but I think that only those who seek highly introspective movies to serve more as Rorscach cards would rate this really high.

I decided to click on the spoiler's warning because I'm not sure what is a dramatic plot development in this movie because of the gaps and "how everyday" the entire movie seems to be.

Yeah, this movie is slow. But it is definitely worth watching and thinking about. Life is so fragile, and we tend to waste our days with unnecessary details. The plot unfolds at its own pace, beautifully and touchingly. And the film looks so stunning, that at times I felt that I was watching a virtual painting. I expected more music, though, and this is where the movie failed my expectations.

As I watched, comparisons to "About Schmidt" came to mind. To sum it up, one movie is a European treatment of the change of life/retirement theme; the other one is typically American.

This movie is WORTH viewing, but be prepared for a leisurely pace that sometimes stalls to the point of frustration. The scenes of Schultz' tiny boat wending its way through the Louisiana swamps are worth the cost of a rental. I recommend you see it on a lazy afternoon when you have nothing else planned.

It's hard to imagine how the director, Michael Schorr, could draw us into the story of a plump old retiree with a face as interesting as a honeydew melon (Horst Krauss), but he manages to do it.

Lif in Schultze's German town is filled with inaction. We get several static shots of the architecture and the layout of the streets, empty of occupants. I mean it literally. We see a shot of a tiled and sterile courtyard -- and the shot hangs there for a good ten seconds.

The same technique is used throughout. Lots of scenes in which people are doing something, and Schultze is off in a corner somewhere, observing or just staring. There are two shots of a gray sky both held for about one minute. In the first, the screen is blank except that a slender sliver of material enters the picture and slices through it in a leisurely way. We guess it's one of the blades of the energy-producing windmills we glimpsed at the beginning, but it could be anything -- a sickle, a helicopter rotor, a mobile. In the second static shot of the sky, it is blank except for three unmoving contrails from high-altitude jets.

He's not a man without honor in his own Dorf though, no Umberto D. He's an accordion player in the local Musikverein and though he shows more enthusiasm than talent he's chosen to represent the village at its sister city's music festival in America, New Braunfels, Texas, where as a matter of fact you can still buy a good Wurst. It isn't that life in his village is bad. It's just that it's extremely dull, even for a dull man.

And then he has a musical epiphany. Surfing the radio dial one night he runs across a station play a Cajun song. He shrugs, turns the radio off, walks across the room, stops, turns around thoughtfully, goes back to the radio and turns it on again, listens to the tune for a few minutes, then shuts it off and begins to practice the tune on his accordion.

In deliberately paced movies like this, the smallest changes in detail catch your attention. In this scene it's the expression of Schultze's face and he grasps what the Cajun music is doing.

There really isn't much to the rest of the story. Schultze goes to America and winds up buying a small fishing boat and travels around in the Louisiana bayous, soon realizing that compared to professional Cajun musicians he retains his amateur status. He packs his accordion away and that's the end of his musical career.

The natives are friendly enough in a minimal way but Schultze has a language problem and in any case is rather shy. A woman dances with him at a Cajun nightclub and leaves him in the middle of the dance. He looks around, puzzled and disappointed, and then leaves. She returns a moment later with two drinks and searches for him without success. Mostly they pay no more attention to Schultze than they would to any other stranger.

Here's a spoiler. Finally, he falls in temporarily with an African-American woman and her young girl. They invite him to dinner and he stuffs himself on crab and other Cajun food. Then they go out drinking and dancing and having generally a hell of a good time. Too good. Schultze is a heart attack waiting to happen. The black woman takes him to her home and covers him tenderly while he sleeps in a chair, dreaming of the dance he's just been to. Then he burps twice and dies quietly.

Schultze's funeral back in Germany is played neither as tragedy or comedy. It's a solemn affair, as funerals tend to be, except that in the middle of a woman's peroration somebody's cell phone starts ringing and people make wisecracks about it and laugh. As the large group of mourners walks away from the graveyard, the village band plays the Cajun tune that had so captivated Schultze. The last shot has the column in black silhouette passing the ever-turning windmill of (I guess) life.

Schultze did what he longed to do at the end of his life course. What more could anyone ask? That the movie is so touching is a tribute to the director and writer, and to Hort Krauss, the actor. Neither gives us much reason to love Schultze. It's not that simple-minded. If we can identify with him it's because his ordinariness is an extension of our own.

**Contains Minor Spoilers**

A movie that has its German premiere one year after it got some festival price surely sounds fishy. And so it was. If you want every prejudice about Germany certified, you should go and see this movie. The boredom of existence virtually soaks the silver screen as you enter the life of three retired coal miners, all of which seem to be depressed to a point short of suicide. Good thing for the hero Schultze is that he does not even have to kill himself as cancer is doing it for him. In his own unemotional mechanical fashion he enters a quest to nowhere. Trailing the path of some new and unaccustomed happy music he gets lost in Texas the very same way he got lost in his German life. It very much compares to the loneliness in "About Schmidt" but without any outbursts of fun.

From a technical perspective the movie is excellent. You have good scene compositions, nice angles and even some panning. The sound design is also well done. The movie itself however is as boring as it gets. You simply don't connect to the main characters except you're in a gloomy mood yourself, which I am not. Overall it's a movie that shows that the director has learned the trade but is in dire need of a good script.

I rated it 4 for it looked good and was consistent in its speed of narration. The content itself was horribly boring (read: the intent to depress me failed) apart from a little twist at the end.