A review of the 1987 film Cobra Verde. Currently streaming on the Criterion Channel for the curious.

Herzog–Kinski gets a photocopy: recognizable, but lighter, blurrier. Toner running low.

Herzog has never been a first-rate formalist, nor seemingly interested in becoming one. But the earlier Kinski collaborations had a heavier narrative spine, enough to bear the strain of both Herzog’s excesses and elisions. Aguirre gave us a clean line of descent into colonial delirium (one way down, no off-ramps). Fitzcarraldo approached something like classical design: a dream, the means, an obstacle, yadda yadda. With those vertebrae in place, Herzog could roam freely— toward the striking setpieces (the jungle march, the boat over the mountain); the mass-scale choreography; the barbed images of empire and folly; and, naturally, toward Kinski’s deranged ferocity. What a face! What dangerous, animal grace! For actors who act with their whole body, he and Toshiro Mifune are standing comfortably on the podium.

In Cobra, the spectacle remains, as does Kinski’s fury (perhaps never more feral), but the spine has gone missing. Paging an orthopedist. The movie lurches, too fast and then too slow. We meet Kinski’s character in Brazil as a laborer, then a bandit, then a slave overseer, then an agent of the Portuguese state, all in about twenty minutes. Later in Africa, factions appear and dissolve, loyalties shift, events accumulate—but they don’t lock together. If only all failures were this interesting.

The high points come without Kinski, when the film slips into a semi-documentary mode: the camera sitting back to observe ritual, movement, and social choreography without trying to hammer them into plot. But then the movie doesn’t conclude so much as give up the effort. Like this.