Werner Herzog's second fiction feature of 2009 works as a fascinating counterpart to Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, also screening at the Festival. While that film is a savagely ironic and witty portrait of a bad cop, My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done flips this premise on its head and looks at a lily-white good cop – albeit one caught in a very strange situation.
My Son, My Son is based on a harrowing true story. The cop of the tale, Hank, is called to a bungalow in a respectable San Diego neighbourhood where a man named Brad has barricaded himself in his house and taken two hostages. Across the street, Brad's mother lies dead, found sprawled in a pool of blood, the victim of a sword wound. The son is suspected of the murder. As Hank uneasily prowls the sunlit street outside the bungalow, a string of Brad's friends arrive on the scene, among them his girlfriend and a director pal. Slowly the bizarre pieces of the story are placed in front of the cop, who tries to make sense of it all. Not only has the suspected murderer never been the same since he returned from a kayaking trip to Peru, but he also seems to be suffering from a strange mother complex. To deepen the psychosis even further, Brad has been rehearsing one of Sophocles' plays that has a lot to do with mothers!
Herzog plays the film straight, but the mood and tone he imparts is an eerie blend of David Lynch, who executive produced the film, and his own singular style. Herzog has always been attracted to the obsessive, and in the case of this odd murder, he has found a subject more than suited to his personality. Indeed, he had his own Peruvian adventure years ago with Fitzcarraldo and had to deal with the antics of actor Klaus Kinski in the process. The cast is universally superb, the film captures the detached isolation of San Diego perfectly (as Bad Lieutenant does with New Orleans), and Herzog proves that his restless creative spirit is still very much alive and not restricted, as it has been until recently, to the documentary mode.
Piers Handling
Werner Herzog was born in Munich. He has directed dozens of shorts and features, both fiction and documentary, including
Aguirre, the Wrath of God (72),
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser: Every Man for Himself and God Against All (74), which won the Special Grand Jury Prize at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival,
Stroszek (77),
Nosferatu (78),
Woyzeck (79),
Fitzcarraldo (82), which won the Best Director Award at Cannes in 1982,
Little Dieter Needs to Fly (97),
My Best Fiend (99),
Grizzly Man (05),
Rescue Dawn (06),
Encounters at the End of the World (07),
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (09), also screening at the Festival, and
My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done (09).