Day of the Idiots (1981)

Pretty Good

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

"Tag der Idioten" or "Day of the Idiots" is a West German German-language film from 1981, so it has its 35th anniversary this year. It is among the more known works by director Werner Schroeter and as always he also wrote the script here, with the help of Dana Horaková. The film runs for over 100 minutes and takes place during an insane asylum from start to finish basically. The title indicates a slightly comedic note too and you may think the same when you read the title of my review, but nope: This is 100% drama, occasionally thriller even. Schroeter's most known works, including this one, mostly focus on the female psyche and it is fitting that he has actresses Carole Bouquet, Ingrid Caven and Christine Kaufmann play main characters in here. Marie Luise Marjan ("Lindenstraße" is in it too. Of course, there are also male characters in here, but neither the male actors are known, nor they play a role as big as the female ones.Schroeter won a German Film Award for his direction here and the movie was also nominated at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. I cannot share these awards bodies's support I have to say. It baffles me how it has a fairly good rating here on IMDb and received many strong reviews. I personally cannot say I enjoyed the watch at all. The first half hour was still somewhat decent, but honestly I felt all the supporting characters were so uninteresting that I never managed to make a connection to any of them or the film in general. The best thing about the film? Certainly Bouquet's absolutely gorgeous looks and there is even full frontal nudity in here involving her, actually in the very first seconds already, which means basically that you can turn it off after minute 5. No surprise Bouquet starred in a Bond film the very same year this was made. She must have been among the most attractive people of the planet in the early 1980s. But her looks and somewhat decent performance alone cannot save this film from being ultimately very forgettable. Occasionally, like Schroeter's works, it has a touch of being too theatrical and more suitable for a stage play than a screen movie. Then again, I am not impressed in general by what I have seen from the filmmaker so far. If you like, Schroeter's works in general, then maybe you may like this one too. It is certainly not his worst. I still give it a thumbs-down though. Not recommended.

Carol Schneider (Carole Bouquet) leads an aimless life with her lover Alexander. Finding no possibility to express herself in the "outside" society, she moves on to an "inside" society - inside a lunatic asylum, that is! She prefers this world to the real world, despite its many terrors (one inmate even commits suicide), but she is unable to exist in either of them. Carole Bouquet, famous for Bunuel's "Obscure Object of Desire" and arriving straight from shooting the James Bond movie "For Your Eyes Only", played her most memorable role - a mad person in a mad world - in this tormenting vision of Werner Schroeter, who certainly was neither trying to make an accessible picture nor to avoid anything shocking. If you prefer something you still shall remember next year over the fast food flicks you have forgotten tomorrow, I think it is worth trying.

When Hollywood was already producing the first blockbuster classics like Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark in the late seventies and early eighties, German cinemas only saw three kinds of own film productions on their screens - stupid nonsense comedies, successful softsex films like the "Schulmadchenreport" or "Lass jucken Kumpel" series and boring and message-ladden post-1968 "auteur movies". The latter section contained some very good films, though, but most of these sometimes badly-made student films without any scripts and plots were really a big thing amongst German film critics (who were probably the only audience to that).The pointless "Tag der Idioten" from 1982 is such a movie. The non-story tells us something about a crazy woman who is looking for contact and checks out some new ways of life restlessly, like staying in an asylum, but finally she can't decide and commits suicide. This is basically what it's all about, and the whole apocalyptic view on life, a general topic of those times of left-winged/communist terrorism and the rise of alternative lifestyles all over Europe, becomes increasingly disturbing and boring to the spectators at the same time.Two persons are worth being mentioned in this connection. Main actress Carole Boquet just starred in this German b-movie a few months after her big role as Bond girl (!) in the James Bond adventure "For Your Eyes Only" with Roger Moore, and script writer Dana Horakova later became the Minister of Culture in the conservative and right-winged city council of Hamburg from 2001-2004. Unbelievable but true!