MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Voyager’ Goes Nowhere, Very Slowly

What a long, strange trip Volker Schlondorff’s “Voyager” turns out to be. Skillfully made by one of Germany’s premier filmmakers, it is seriously overloaded with ennui, anomie and Angst. A film of quality but not necessarily of interest, it would sink like a lugubrious stone if it were not for the wonderfully charming performance of Julie Delpy, which gives the film whatever life it manages.

A careful fable based on “Homo Faber,” a novel by the Swiss Max Frisch (Schlondorff and Rudy Wurlitzer did the screenplay), “Voyager” is so defined by the fatalistic spirit of somber existentialism that one of its characters shows up reading Camus’ “The Stranger.”

Curiously enough, “Voyager’s” plot centers on a rather florid device, something that would, in a more conventional film, be treated as more or less a surprise. In “Voyager,” however, the audience is let in on the secret from almost the very beginning, much earlier than the participants themselves.

This is no common melodrama, Schlondorff is sternly telling us. What is of interest here is not figuring out some pedestrian plot but rather watching inexorable fate move on its slow, predestined path, crushing feeble human desires as it goes stolidly along. While observing fate at work may be spiritually edifying and psychologically purifying, it is definitely not a whole lot of fun.

The year is 1957 and “Voyager’s” protagonist is Walter Faber (Sam Shepard), an American engineer whose idea of fun is watching machinery in action. Just back from three months building a dam in the jungle, he runs across a German businessman at Caracas airport and a vague sense of unease grips him. The businessman, it turns out, is the brother of a friend who Faber hasn’t seen in years.

A man who fears nothing but being at the mercy of “a train of coincidence,” Faber starts to feel seriously spooked, and, after a considerable amount of brooding in various locales, he finds himself almost on the spur of the moment taking a slow boat to Paris to attend an engineering conference.

Laconic to the point of somnolence, Shepard may have seemed like the ideal person to play the feelingless Faber, who doesn’t read novels or even dream. But encouraging Shepard to be emotionless, like encouraging Madonna to be outrageous, is something done at one’s own risk.

For even though Faber’s inability to register human feelings is an essential part of the story, having Shepard, an actor who could make Gary Cooper seem garrulous, in the part ends up making “Voyager” (at selected theaters, rated PG-13) even more ponderous than it would be otherwise.

Fortunately, from an audience point of view, Shepard doesn’t spend the entire voyage looking glumly out to sea; he meets up with a young and vivacious girl he names Sabeth. As played by Julie Delpy (previously seen in both “Europa Europa” and Bertrand Tavernier’s “Beatrice”), Sabeth is a buoyantly charming and quite natural presence.

What “Voyager” has in store for Sabeth and Faber is not at all what either of them expects, but putting it that way makes this film sound more involving than it manages to be. Faber’s fate is no doubt meant to be a metaphor of sorts, but when the metaphor is stronger than the story, the audience suffers as much as the characters.

‘Voyager’

Sam Shepard: Faber

Julie Delpy: Sabeth

Barbara Sukowa: Hannah

Dieter Kirchlechner: Herbert Henke

Traci Lind: Charlene

Deborah-Lee Furness: Ivy

A Castle Hill Productions, Inc. release. Director Volker Schlondorff. Producer Eberhard Junkersdorf. Screenplay Volker Schlondorff and Rudy Wurlitzer, based on the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch. Cinematographers Yorgos Arvanitis, Pierre L’Homme. Editor Dagmar Hirtz. Costumes Barbara Baum. Music Stanley Myers. Production design Nicos Perakis. Set designer Benedikt Herforth. Running time: 1 hour, 57 minutes.

MPAA-rated PG-13.