Kate and Rooney Mara play twisted twins: first clip from Bucking Fastard
Werner Herzog’s film, inspired by a news story, looks very delirious. It will be presented in Venice in September.
The absence of Bucking Fastard at the last Cannes Film Festival caused a stir. Although he was offered to present the film as part of Cannes Première, Werner Herzog simply refused, which he made known publicly. The German filmmaker wanted the competition or nothing, in particular so that Rooney and Kate Mara could compete for the best actress prize.
Reunited for the first time on screen, the Mara sisters play twins in this drama with an intriguing synopsis:
“Jean and Joan Holbrooke, who are so close that they speak in unison, love the same man, and have the same dreams. They even make the same slip of the tongue in unison. We can’t see the world as they see it, but we see how the world reacts to them – through the courts and the press, through those who want to help them and those who want to use them, through the gazes of tame and wild beasts, and even through their own echoes from the center of the Earth.“
This story is inspired by a real news story, that of Greta and Freda Chaplin, which marked England in the 1980s. In his memoirs, published in 2022, Herzog recounts his disturbing meeting with the Chaplin twins, who died in 2007 and 2020:
“We know that twins can develop their own language to exclude the rest of the world, but Freda and Greta were saying the same words at the same time. They wore exactly the same clothes, hairstyles, shoes. Their bags and umbrellas were identical (…) You could have folded a photo of them, and the two halves would have stuck.”
After the announcement of the selection of Bucking Fastard At the Venice Film Festival, where it will be in competition, a first clip showing Kate and Rooney answering questions in court has been released.
Orlando Bloom and Domhnall Gleeson are also in the cast of Bucking Fastardwhich does not yet have a release date. The title of the film takes up a slip said to have been made by the real Chaplin sisters in court.
