Steppenwolf (1974)

          The ’70s produced a slew of movies that feel like drug experiences caught on film, and Steppenwolf belongs on any list of these head-spinning cinematic trips. Adapted from German writer Hermann Hesse’s novel about a despondent man’s journey into his own subconscious, the picture uses animated sequences, music-driven montages, and primitive electronic visual effects to simulate various regions within the mind, and everything is shown through the prism of a protagonist who’s losing touch with reality. It’s heady stuff, to be sure, and also quite depressing and humorless; while not an outright pain-fest in the David Lynch mode, Steppenwolf is singularly strange and unpleasant.

          Max von Sydow stars as Harry Haller, a man caught in an unusual sort of a midlife crisis: After a long career as an academic, Harry has determined that he’s losing the war between the human half of his soul and the “wolf” controlling the animal side of his soul, meaning he’s no longer suited to interact with normal people. Roaming city streets every night in an aimless haze, he discovers the entrance to something called “The Magic Theater,” a place “for madmen only,” so he ventures into this bizarre new realm and encounters all sorts of surrealistic sensations.

          As the movie drifts back and forth between the theater and Harry’s now-altered everyday life, Harry experiences casual sex that challenges his morality, drug use that affects his perceptions, and dreamlike encounters with historical figures like Goerthe and Mozart that shake his understanding of the universe. Obviously, straightforward plotting is not the priority here, so Steppenwolf is a bit of a chore to sit through simply because there’s no overarching sense of momentum or purpose; rather, the thrust of the piece is Harry’s painful attempt to wrestle with life’s big questions.

          To put this cerebral concept onscreen, writer-director Fred Haines uses jarring aural and visual flourishes. The soundtrack features freeform-jazz keyboard freakouts that sound like the prog-rock band Yes tuning up before a concert, and the crude video effects placing Harry into two-dimensional backgrounds have the vibe of music videos from the early days of MTV. However, these stylistic touches might have had greater impact if the movie didn’t feel impossibly pretentious. At one point, Harry says the following mouthful to Goerthe: “You clearly recognized the utter hopelessness of the human condition, but you preach the opposite—that our spiritual stirrings mean something.” The literary aspirations of the line are admirable, but overwritten language of this sort doesn’t exactly work as cinematic drama.

          Haines also falls into the predictable trap of creating scenes that are as interminable to watch as they are for the characters to experience. In one such vignette, Harry joins a surreal dinner party in which people barely speak to each other while a super-loud clock ticks off the passing minutes; then, after someone makes a joke that isn’t funny, everyone bursts into riotous laughter. There’s a lot of vivid stuff in Steppenwolf, particularly the sequences with animation and puppets that recall Terry Gilliam’s famous Monty Python cartoons, but the constant onslaught of unhappiness and vagueness feels self-indulgent, as if Haines considered it pandering to clarify his vision before committing it to film.

Steppenwolf: FREAKY

Siddhartha (1972)

          Originally published in 1922, German author Hermann Hesse’s novel Siddhartha later became a touchstone for the counterculture generation. A poetic exploration of one man’s lifelong search for meaning, the story offers a simple but deep parable about looking past the pleasures of the flesh to find fulfillment in oneness with the universe, a theme that resounded mightily with seekers in the ’60s and ’70s. One such seeker, filmmaker Conrad Rooks, tackled the thankless task of bringing Siddhartha to the screen, even though the project was doomed from the start, commercially speaking; exacerbating the fact that spiritual journeys rarely sell popcorn, the book is so beloved that no movie could live up to impossible expectations.

          However, viewed by someone who isn’t a member of the novel’s fan base, Siddhartha is an earnest and quite beautiful film. Rooks’ screenplay (to which Paul Mayersberg and Natasha Ullman contributed) doesn’t try to communicate the depth and nuance of the source material. Rather, the script merely catalogs things that happen to the lead character, Siddhartha. Building from this base, Rooks uses intoxicating cinematography and music to create a ruminative atmosphere that contextualizes narrative events. So, while devoted fans of the novel might scoff that Rooks’ adaptation is oversimplified, another way to look at the movie is to say that Rooks’ adaptation is purified: He whittled the book down to an essence even casual viewers can grasp. Whether this approach honors Hesse’s book is for others to say, but there’s no disputing the film’s strongest virtues.

          First and foremost, the cinematography by frequent Woody Allen/Ingmar Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist is rapturous. Shooting at vibrant locations throughout India, Nykvist captures subtle textures of light, from the way sunbeams dance across the surface of a river at dusk to the way a canopy of trees dilutes morning sunlight in a dense forest. The film’s atmosphere is so evocative that viewers can almost feel branches crunching underfoot while characters walk. Few movies offer such a potent sense of place, and for this particular story, which involves a man learning how to escape the mortal plane, intense physicality is essential. The music, by an assortment of Indian musicians, is equally involving, with pulsing rhythms and undulating melodies working their way into viewers’ brains like welcome guests. At its best moments, Siddhartha is hypnotic.

          That said, the performances have a perfunctory quality. Leading man Shashi Kapoor is handsome and sincere, just as leading lady Simi Garewal is overpoweringly seductive. However, the actors mostly read their lines in monotones, delivering such flat performances that Kapoor’s lone crying scene, which occurs toward the end of the picture, is a startling disruption of the emotional status quo. An argument could be made that quiet acting suits this story about characters learning to hear inner voices, but that’s a stretch. Still, Siddhartha is compelling despite its imperfections.

Siddhartha: GROOVY