The titular Schultze, no first name, gets more than the blues. He gets a muse. A retired German salt miner and an amateur polka accordionist, he stumbles upon a piece of errant zydeco on late-night radio, the answer to a question he never knew to ask. After a bad reception at a meeting of the local music club ("Bloody jungle music!"), he pursues his bliss on a solo odyssey to Texas and Louisiana. The static camera and Kaurismaki-like deadpan seem a perfect fit for the swollen, water-balloon physique of the stolid hero. (Delightful shots of him squeezed into a pair of swimming trunks for a motel hot tub or doing deep knee bends in T-shirt and suspenders.) And the path charted out for him by first-time writer and director Michael Schorr unfolds as a touching affirmation -- a very gently, lightly touching affirmation -- of the universal Rebel Within. A man raised among garden gnomes may nonetheless discover a taste for jambalaya. Horst Krause, Harald Warmbrunn, Karl Fred Müller. (2004) — Duncan Shepherd
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