Salt and Fire – first look review

Wern­er Herzog’s recent nar­ra­tive fea­tures have blurred the line between ​‘inter­est­ing’ and ​‘good’. Obey­ing an uncon­ven­tion­al cin­e­mat­ic lan­guage and dis­turb­ing all the rules of genre, it’s often dif­fi­cult to find any cri­te­ria to judge them against. Even the crit­i­cal­ly acclaimed Bad Lieu­tenant: Port of Call New Orleans is supreme­ly strange, though it is inar­guably inven­tive and con­sis­tent­ly entertaining.

At times Herzog’s Salt and Fire suc­ceeds at being both these things. High­ly alle­gor­i­cal, the film sees a UN sci­en­tif­ic del­e­ga­tion abduct­ed by the man respon­si­ble for a mas­sive eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter in South Amer­i­ca. His plan is to teach them a les­son, but it’s not exact­ly clear what about. On paper the premise doesn’t sound par­tic­u­lar­ly riv­et­ing, but sure enough Herzog’s con­tin­ued the­mat­ic explo­ration of the often fraught cohab­i­ta­tion between man and nature comes through. As explored in his excel­lent new meta-doc­u­men­tary Into the Infer­no, the direc­tor is not inter­est­ed in bio­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­na per se, but rather in the peo­ple who are fas­ci­nat­ed by them. His 2005 doc­u­men­tary Griz­zly Man is prob­a­bly the most suc­cess­ful vari­a­tion on that schtick, relat­ing as it does the sto­ry of a man who risked his life dai­ly to hang out with the bears he adored, mon­u­men­tal in their indif­fer­ence and ulti­mate sav­agery towards him.

Salt and Fire sim­i­lar­ly fol­lows peo­ple obsessed with and con­cerned about nature, but rather than tell a straight­for­ward ​‘sto­ry’ about envi­ron­men­tal change, geopol­i­tics or eco­nom­ic strife, this pecu­liar film has dis­tinct day­dream feel to it. Find­ing them­selves in that strange moment after every­thing has already hap­pened, where there is noth­ing to do but wait, the char­ac­ters are not agents of change in the tra­di­tion­al nar­ra­tive sense but are instead left to wax lyri­cal about noth­ing and every­thing at the same time. Their hope­less­ness is the ground for solemn state­ments (“Truth is the only daugh­ter of time”) but also for absur­dist humour, with the dif­fer­ence between the two for­ev­er rather thin.

As is often the case with the Ger­man direc­tor, it is unclear whether he means to be delib­er­ate­ly fun­ny or not. The char­ac­ters live in the long, slow expec­ta­tion of the inescapable after­math of things that have already hap­pened and can­not be changed, be it the eco­log­i­cal dis­as­ter that has led to the cre­ation of a large salt lake threat­en­ing to engulf the entire plan­et, or the immi­nent arrest of the cor­po­rate boss respon­si­ble for that dis­as­ter. In this world, action and sto­ry are sim­ply an illu­sion and what begins as a pul­sat­ing eco­log­i­cal thriller with the abduc­tion of the UN rep­re­sen­ta­tives soon gives way to a more ambigu­ous film.

Chief antag­o­nist Matt Riley (Michael Shan­non) abducts UN sci­en­tist Lau­ra (Veron­i­ca Fer­res) but only to make her realise the human impli­ca­tions of the pol­lu­tion he him­self has caused. Riley strands her on a cac­tus island in the mid­dle of the salt lake with his own two sons, who have been blind­ed by the fumes ema­nat­ing from the dis­as­ter for which he is respon­si­ble. His rea­son­ing is only revealed in the film’s final moments in what is a rather weird reveal. Why would this man want to incrim­i­nate him­self even fur­ther? But this is par for the course in a film in which no one acts as we expect them to. A vil­lain in a wheel­chair explains that he only uses it when he is ​“tired of life”, while Lau­ra reg­u­lar­ly takes self­ies to check on her appear­ance as her poi­soned col­leagues suc­cumb to bouts of vio­lent diar­rhea off screen.

This odd­ness only goes so far towards retain­ing our atten­tion. But after an abrupt tonal shift, the doc­u­men­tary-style sequences which fol­low are sig­nif­i­cant­ly more reward­ing. The film finds gen­uine poet­ry when it pays close atten­tion to the dai­ly life of Lau­ra and the two blind boys on the lake. Often entire­ly word­less, this sec­tion stands out in sharp con­trast with the rest of the film for its total lack of sar­casm and strong sense of the real, empha­sised by reg­u­lar Her­zog col­lab­o­ra­tor Peter Zeitlinger’s strik­ing real-time footage. We even­tu­al­ly return to the lighter, weird­er tone, but not before Salt and Fire has spanned sev­er­al reg­is­ters of inten­si­ty which are nev­er meant to be tak­en at face val­ue. So while this is a thor­ough­ly wild, uneven film, the real plea­sures lie in won­der­ing what Her­zog real­ly had in mind.