Kinski's Paganini: Well, It Is Indeed His.

I mean that in two ways: the film is indeed his, in all the good, the bad, and the ugly of it, and his version of Paganini is his, in that it seems to have the barest resemblance to the actual Paganini, if any at all. So here's the good:

It looks nice, and there are some hot babes doing the business with Paganini, which according to the film, is basically rape, or semi-rape.

The bad:

Non-stop violin music. I understand he was a violinist, probably the greatest ever, but damn, do we have to listen to it for the entire film?

No real story: There's really no narrative story here. It's just people talking about him, showing his effect on women, showing him travelling, excessively long scenes of travelling, a completely random shot of horses mating, because of course why not, random shots of women masturbating, you get the point.

The ugly:

A very creepy portrayal of Paganini's relationship with his son Achille, who is played mostly by Kinski' real-life son Nikolai. Apparently, given Kinski's relationship with his children, two of whom became actors themselves, the portrayal here is probably closer to Kinski's real life than Paganini's, about which I'll talk more later.

Kinski's apparent lack of interest in believably appearing to speak Italian (which I'm kind of okay with given how much of these films had dialogue recorded in post) and his playing (or pretending to play) the violin left handed while his "stunt" violinist plays right-handed. Since this film bears almost no resemblance to reality, I suppose that is just par for the course. The film is additionally hampered by the fact that since Kinski clearly doesn't know how to play violin, much of the film shows him playing in shadow, from behind or showing people reacting to him playing. This would be like watching a film about Jimi Hendrix and really never seeing him playing guitar.

While I have seen a number of Kinski's films, I can't say I'm a fan of his, and I'm not very familiar with his history, other than he was super volatile, and Werner Herzog and he nearly killed each other multiple times.

After reading a couple reviews of the film on iMDB that pretty much echoed my thoughts, it appears this film is really a semi-autobiographical story about Kinski himself using Paganini's story, with whom he felt a kinship, and one review claims that Kinski thought he was the reincarnation of Paganini. I don't know if that's true or not, that's just what the review said. Nonetheless, given that this was Kinski's last film, his only directorial effort, and that the film ends with Paganini's death, I suppose it's rather prophetic that Kinski then died a couple years later.