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"Voyager" starts in mystery, and intrigues us. It continues with intelligence, and absorbs us. And then it ends in melodrama, and disappoints us - not least because characters as smart as these should be able to solve the movie's central question long before they do.

The film, set in the 1950s, stars Sam Shepard , very dry and analytical, as an engineer who stands aside from everything, as if detached from life itself. Once it was not so with him. Once he was in love. That was long ago. Now, on board an airplane, he is faced with a situation many of us have fantasized: The plane is going to crash, and he has plenty of time to think about it. He does. He does not panic, and indeed seems absorbed in all of the mechanics of the approaching disaster.

When he is spared, he seems detached from that, too. But through a coincidence he has met a man on the plane who can give him news about a friend from his past, and the news sets him off on an odyssey through strange places to find a woman he did not know was still alive, the woman he once loved. Along the way on this journey, aboard a ship, he meets a young woman ( Julie Delpy ), and feels an instinctive closeness to her. The feeling is returned, up to a point.

They decide to travel together through southern Europe, sharing a car, he playing the mentor role as they visit the ruins and remnants of earlier civilizations. Eventually he learns something we have been half-expecting all along, the name of the young woman's mother. She is the woman who was once his lover. Does that make the girl . . .

Don't be in a hurry to ask. The movie isn't. And in a way the possibility of incest is the least interesting thing about this movie, even though the screenplay treats it as the most important.

That wise critic Stanley Kauffmann, of the New Republic, observes about incest that it makes an unsatisfactory topic for fiction, because we do not know how to feel about it. Of course we are against forced incest - child abuse and so on. But what about accidental incest, in which the parties discover too late what their real relationship is? Does that fascinate us? Not much, because almost by definition it's of interest only to the involved parties. They can be expected to have strong feelings, but we don't share them because, when you get right down to it, we're not related to them.

"Voyager," based on the novel Homo Faber by Max Frisch, has been directed by Volker Schlondorff (" The Tin Drum ") as if he, too, is more interested in what the characters say than in how they're related. He makes the Shepard character into a kind of man not often seen in the movies, a literate engineer, given to dispassionate analysis. The daughter is pretty and smart and, like many young women, too quick to believe romantic love is an answer to anything.

Her mother, played by the gifted Polish actress Barbara Sukowa , has great reason to be angry with Shepard because of what happened long ago, but (as we can see in flashback) she should also be angry at the conventions of the Idiot Plot syndrome, which prevented both her and Shepard from saying absolutely obvious things that would have greatly lessened their pain.

The end of "Voyager" does not leave us with very much. The film follows its melodramatic compulsion right into oblivion, like a lemming.

Thinking back, we realize we've met some interesting people and heard some good talk, and that it's shame all those contrived plot points about incest got in the way of what was otherwise a perfectly stimulating relationship. This is a movie that is good in spite of what it thinks it's about.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Voyager (1992)

110 minutes

Sam Shepard as Faber

Julie Delpy as Sabeth

Barbara Sukowa as Hannah

Directed by

• Volker Schlondorff

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Equal parts road movie and Greek tragedy, Volker Schlondorff's latest literary adaptation (of Max Frisch's German classic Homo Faber) makes good use of fine material.

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Equal parts road movie and Greek tragedy, Volker Schlondorff’s latest literary adaptation (of Max Frisch’s German classic Homo Faber) makes good use of fine material.

In this moral tale without a moral, Walter Faber (Swiss in the book, Yank in pic) is an inveterate traveler, an engineer and pragmatist approaching middle age in the not-yet-defined postwar Europe of the 1950s. Sam Shepard is ideal as Faber, the quintessentially cool cowboy-loner-businessman.

Via black & white flashbacks, Faber recalls his days as a student in Zurich before the war: he was in love with Hanna, a German Jew pregnant with his child. Waiting for a flight to Venezuela, Faber learns that his friend Joachim married Hanna, and they had a daughter but divorced shortly afterward.

Back in New York, he decides to travel to Paris by ship. On board he meets Sabeth (Julie Delpy), 20ish and returning home after studying in the States. Faber initially ignores her until her charm and almost unbearably fragile beauty begin to take effect. Is it love or a protective, paternal instinct?

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A well-told tale, with a fine cast and good tech credits.

Germany - France

• Production: Bioskop/Action. Director Volker Schlondorff; Producer Eberhard Junkersdorf; Screenplay Volker Schlondorff, Rudy Wurlitzer; Camera Yorgos Arvanitis, Pierre Lhomme; Editor Dagmar Hirtz; Music Stanley Myers; Art Director Nicos Perakis
• Crew: (Color) Available on VHS. Extract of a review from 1991. Running time: 117 MIN.
• With: Sam Shepard Julie Delpy Barbara Sukowa Dieter Kirchlechner Traci Lind Deborra-Lee Furness

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Volker Schlöndorff

Sam Shepard

Walter Faber

Julie Delpy

Barbara Sukowa

Dieter Kirchlechner

Herbert Hencke

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By Peter Travers

Peter Travers

Among the pleasures in this flawed but deeply hypnotic film version of Max Frisch’s revered 1957 novel Homo Faber is the sight of Sam Shepard thoroughly engaged in the craft of acting after years of doing hunk-for-hire work in such tripe as Baby Boom and Steel Magnolias . As Wallter Faber, a rational fifty-year-old engineer who gets blindsided by emotion when he meets a young woman, Shepard gives his finest screen performance.

Frisch is influenced by Greek tragedy – as is Shepard, to judge from his stage writing (Buried Child, True West). Though writer-director Volker Schlöndorff creates a suitably portentous atmosphere, he sometimes presses too hard. Schlöndorff’s big-book fetish can be fruitful (The Tin Drum) or not (Swann in Love). But he and Frisch, who died in April, make a worthy match.

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Faber has been changed from Swiss to American, but the script faithfully hugs the book’s contours. On the way from Venezuela to New York in 1957, Faber’s plane crashes. (The camera work of Pierre L’Homme and Yorgos Arvanitis is breathtaking here and throughout.) Awaiting rescue in the Mexican desert, Faber is jolted when another passenger tells him that Hannah (the great Barbara Sukowa), the woman Faber loved and left twenty years before, had married the passenger’s brother and had a daughter.

Later, on a ship heading for France, Faber recalls his pain at losing Hannah. On board, he meets the youthful Sabeth (the excellent Julie Delpy), who stirs the emotions he’s repressed in his rigid devotion to intellect. Sabeth awakens him to love until – on a voyage that ends heart-breakingly in Greece – Faber must face the truth about Sabeth’s real identity. The film wants to evoke a sense of pity and terror. Of course, one man’s existential catharsis is another man’s kitsch. But Voyager, riding on Schlöndorff’s trust that audiences will get excited about the play of ideas, rewards close attention.

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Product Description

Oscar nominee Sam Shepard takes on the role of a lifetime in award-winning director Volker Schlondorff's powerful story of a monumental love affair that spanned two generations and six continents. Following a trail of odd coincidences that leads him from a plane crash in Mexico to a transatlantic voyage, engineer Walter Faber (Shepard) meets the beautiful young Sabeth (Julie Delpy). Traveling across Europe together, Faber's life is rejuvenated by Sabeth's love until phantoms from his past confront him with an unbelievable truth.

Product details

• Is Discontinued By Manufacturer ‏ : ‎ No
• MPAA rating ‏ : ‎ PG-13 (Parents Strongly Cautioned)
• Product Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 0.7 x 7.5 x 5.4 inches; 2.72 ounces
• Director ‏ : ‎ Volker Schlondorff
• Media Format ‏ : ‎ Widescreen, Multiple Formats, NTSC, Color
• Run time ‏ : ‎ 1 hour and 53 minutes
• Release date ‏ : ‎ May 25, 2010
• Actors ‏ : ‎ Sam Shepard, Julie Delpy, Barbara Sukowa, Traci Lind, Deborah-Lee Furness
• Studio ‏ : ‎ Scorpion Entertainment
• ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003102JJQ
• Number of discs ‏ : ‎ 1
• #10,875 in Drama DVDs

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FILM VIEW; 'Voyager': Good Crew, Slow Trip

By Caryn James

• Feb. 23, 1992

An optimist could describe "Voyager" as what might have turned out if Gary Cooper had wandered into a Bertolucci or Antonioni film. It would have been a happy if unlikely accident. Sam Shepard has never given a more complex or impressive performance than he does here, as a world traveler named Walter Faber, an iconic, Cooperesque American, tough on the outside but sensitive on the inside. Faber learns in the most painful manner that he cannot shut off his emotions or control his fate.

But let's face it: "Voyager" is also unfashionably elliptical and slow, filled with dialogue rather than blazing action. It's no mistake that the film brings to mind a dead actor and a European directorial style that was popular 20 years ago. And though "Voyager" is an English-language film, it is the kind of project that seems to have been spawned by a United Nations committee. A French-German co-production, the film was directed by the German Volker Schlondorff and adapted by the American Rudy Wurlitzer from the novel "Homo Faber," by the Swiss writer Max Frisch. These elements add up to a pessimist's description, sure to convince audiences that it's nap time, or at least time to rent "Terminator 2" again.

The dueling descriptions, each with its measure of truth, suggest that "Voyager" is not to everyone's taste. Yet they also point to a stylistic battle within the film itself, one that implies how perilous it is for a work to model its tone on the personality of a repressed hero.

Faber narrates the film in a series of flashbacks. He is speaking in April 1957, sitting in an airport, mourning the death of a woman whose relation to him becomes clear as he recalls the previous months. As he reconstructs his meeting with Sabeth (Julie Delpy) and their love affair, he also flashes back, in black and white, to his youth in the late 1930's.

"Voyager" is slow, stately and unruffled, even when Faber's plane crashes. That manner reflects the character, who has just described himself to his seatmate as a man who doesn't read fiction and doesn't dream, and who then calmly calculates where their plane will come down.

Though Faber insists he is a technocrat, the flashbacks to the 1930's -- when he had an affair with his best friend's fiancee, who became pregnant with Faber's child but married the friend anyway -- reveal that his lack of passion and imagination is a protective shield built up over the past 20 years.

For a long while, the film manages to be livelier than its hero, largely thanks to Mr. Shepard. Though Faber is Swiss in the novel, casting Mr. Shepard and turning the character into an American was an inspired move. With his 1950's fedora and impassive face, he looks and sounds like the old-fashioned, terse masculine ideal. Still, his intense eyes and his very presence (we know, after all, that he is one of the finest playwrights of his generation) suggest more depth than Gary Cooper ever did. Sam Shepard is an intelligent icon who depicts the complex currents beneath the still surface of "Voyager." It may be a role he can do in his sleep by now; it's no less trenchant for that.

This subterranean approach to Faber's emotions works only as long as his shield of logic is in place. When he begins an affair with the much younger Sabeth and loses his steely control over his feelings, the film fails to loosen up with him. Faber never does become a wild man, but he becomes considerably warmer than the film.

"Voyager" maintains its cool surface long after the audience is itching for it to reflect the hero's resurfacing passion. Not long after Faber and Sabeth's affair had begun on screen, a man in the audience at one recent show said, "His daughter, huh?" He was picking up precisely the question the film dangles in the air at that point and doesn't answer until much later. But while "Voyager" raises the possiblility of unwitting incest (Sabeth does look awfully like the woman in those flashbacks), it proceeds as if the audience weren't meant to notice. The film seems to assume that viewers are as blind to the possibility as Faber, a tactic that only makes "Voyager" seem confused.

While Faber and Sabeth are flirting on an ocean liner, driving through Italy or swimming in the Aegean, the film maintains its detached manner. "You do love me; I see it in your eyes," says Sabeth. "Why are you trying to hide it?" Unfortunately, Faber's back is turned to the camera. It would have helped if we had been able to see that struggle in his eyes, too, instead of having Sabeth talk about it.

When emotions explode at the end, the scene is meant to carry the weight of a long-delayed eruption. By then, however, too much tension has been sacrificed in the interest of maintaining Faber's cool manner.

Certainly, the film makers must have thought that the dialogue would be more compelling than it is, creating a lively surface. Sabeth tells Faber that in Latin his name means "forger of his own fate." Faber wonders pointedly whether life is just chance, a series of coincidences. Such dialogue hovers over "Voyager" without ever connecting to it. Faber himself, the man who regains his passion with deadly results, provides the only true interest, quite apart from the film's philosophical musings or its allusions to Greek tragedy.

Faber is a mysterious, wounded figure, whose sorrow does not seem to reflect fate, the gods or anything except itself. Despite the film's flaws, this hero manages to save "Voyager," even if he cannot save himself.

Voyager (1991)

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MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Voyager’ Goes Nowhere, Very Slowly

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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 a Caracas airport and a vague sense of unease grips him. The businessman, it turns out, is the brother of a friend 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 the Hillcrest Cinemas, 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.

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.

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Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews

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VOYAGER (HOMO FABER)

(director: Volker Schlöndorff; screenwriters: based on the Max Frisch novel Homo Faber/Rudy Wurlitzer; cinematographers: Giorgos Arvanitis/Pierre Lhomme; editor: Dagmar Hirtz; music: Stanley Myers; cast: Sam Shepard (Walter Faber), Julie Delpy (Sabeth), Barbara Sukowa (Hannah), Dieter Kirchlechner (Herbert Hencke), Traci Lind (Charlene), Deborah Lee-Furness (Ivy), August Zirner (Joachim); Runtime: 110; MPAA Rating: PG-13; producer: Eberhard Junkersdorf; Anchor Bay; 1991-France-in German and English with some English subtitles)

“Only bearable for throwing out a number of alluring literary ideas, otherwise it’s bogged down by an overload of symbolism.”

Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz

Under the flat direction of Volker Schlöndorff (“The Handmaid’s Tale”/”Swann in Love”/”The Tin Drum “) the film veers between an Oedipal (offers a modern variation on that Greek myth) and road movie (handsomely shot in Mexico, France, Italy, the United States and Greece), filled with obvious symbolism but still chocked full of literary ideas. It’s based on the 1957 Max Frisch novel Homo Faber and is written by Rudy Wurlitzer.

Middle-aged world-weary globe-trotting traveler, loner (unable to maintain serious relationships) and emotionless New York construction engineer Walter Faber (Sam Shepard) survives a plane crash in the desert of Mexico in 1957. He delays a trip home to visit in the Yucatan jungle a friend from the past, Joachim (August Zirner ), with his German salesman brother Herbert Hencke (Dieter Kirchlechner). Herbert is a passenger on the tragic flight, who tells him his brother married a pregnant Jewish girl named Hannah (Barbara Sukowa) who divorced him and in 1939 returned to Munich never to be heard from again. Faber returns quickly to New York upon seeing that Joachim hanged himself. He then embarks on an ocean voyage to France. On the ship, he meets a German student who studied in the States named Sabeth (Julie Delpy), a ravishing girl in her twenties who captures his heart. It soon becomes obvious to the viewer (but not to Faber) that she’s his daughter from Hannah, the pregnant girl he abandoned 20 years earlier, just before the onset of World War II, when he was a student in Switzerland. After the voyage, Faber plans to take Hannah to Greece to see her mom. Through constant flashbacks Faber pieces his life back together by recalling his student days in Zurich, from before the war.

The film is only bearable for throwing out a number of alluring literary ideas, otherwise it’s bogged down by an overload of symbolism.

REVIEWED ON 9/14/2008 GRADE: C+

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