What would the man who had been travelling the world by bike for over 50 years have to tell us? The answer here is - surprisingly little. He made around 60 close friends/families, had three horrible experiences, found a lot of hospitality. He saw a beautiful sunrise. He kept a lot of lists, collected a lot of stuff, ticked off countries and territories, staying as long as their size dictated according to a formula he developed. Everything was meticulously recorded. Now, back home in his German village, he's creating a museum.
One message from the film is that when we travel, we take ourselves along - and that can mean we don't really travel that much. Another is that we each will look for different things. What I wanted and expected from this film were some insights based on this huge comparative experience of cultures, landscapes, people. I wanted to hear how he had been changed by the experiences, what he had learned, how he came to think and perceive differently. And what the phases of his development were. A different viewer would want something else no doubt.
But I guess it takes a very special person to just keep going for 51 years on a bike. To leave the young Japanese woman he fell in love with to get back on the road, to miss the deaths and funerals of his parents, to not have children and a home - something which he clearly regrets in retrospect.
But in this case, the characteristics and qualities that kept him going on the road for all those years are the same ones that don't make for a very enlightening film. It would be easy to slap a superficial psychological label on Heinz, and facile to do so. Let's just say that this viewer/reader learned much more of interest from, say, Hokkaido Highway Blues and (especially) from the earlier book by the English cyclist who traversed Japan in the opposite direction.
So, the film makes you think - but it's the absences rather than the content that do this.
One message from the film is that when we travel, we take ourselves along - and that can mean we don't really travel that much. Another is that we each will look for different things. What I wanted and expected from this film were some insights based on this huge comparative experience of cultures, landscapes, people. I wanted to hear how he had been changed by the experiences, what he had learned, how he came to think and perceive differently. And what the phases of his development were. A different viewer would want something else no doubt.
But I guess it takes a very special person to just keep going for 51 years on a bike. To leave the young Japanese woman he fell in love with to get back on the road, to miss the deaths and funerals of his parents, to not have children and a home - something which he clearly regrets in retrospect.
But in this case, the characteristics and qualities that kept him going on the road for all those years are the same ones that don't make for a very enlightening film. It would be easy to slap a superficial psychological label on Heinz, and facile to do so. Let's just say that this viewer/reader learned much more of interest from, say, Hokkaido Highway Blues and (especially) from the earlier book by the English cyclist who traversed Japan in the opposite direction.
So, the film makes you think - but it's the absences rather than the content that do this.
