THE GOALIE'S ANXIETY AT THE PENALTY KICK Movie Review

Die Angst Tormannes beim Elfmeter

In his program notes for the Telluride Film Festival screening of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, admirer Errol Morris wrote: “Henry provides the perfect answer to the Hollywood executive's favorite question: ‘what makes these characters sympathetic?’ The answer in Henry: absolutely nothing!” Wim Wenders's 1971 The Goalie's Anxiety at the Penalty Kick will never be mistaken for Henry, but what it shares with that film—in addition to seemingly random murder—is a steadfast refusal to explain the protagonist's actions in conventional terms. While playing a match in Vienna, Joseph Bloch (Arthur Brauss) suddenly decides to simply walk out of the soccer game in which he's tending goal. The journey he begins at that point includes a murder and the search for an old girlfriend, both undertaken with the same matter-of-fact, uninsistent quality that makes Bloch—and the film—quietly unnerving. What prevents the movie from alienating us into the same numb listlessness as its protagonist is that very refusal to explain what makes Bloch “tick.” It's a new and disturbing kind of suspense film, in which what we fear most—our inability to make an irrational universe fit into our Day Runners—comes to pass. Screenplay by Wenders and Peter Handke, from Handke's novel.

NEXT STOP… Kings of the Road, In the White City, Jeanne Dielman

1971 101m/C GE Arthur Brauss, Erika Pluhar, Kai Fischer; D: Wim Wenders; W: Peter Handke, Wim Wenders; C: Robby Muller; M: Jurgen Knieper. VHS FCT, GLV