Schultze and his two mates are made redundant from the salt mine in former East Germany where they work, and they don't know what they'll do with themselves. Schultze picks up his accordion, and accidently discovers Zydeco on the radio, and now he wants to play that instead of the polkas that he's played to date.
If this had been an British film, he'd have been charmingly redeemed by his discovery and he would have had a new life as a Cajun...but it's a German film, so he just carries on as before, sort of half-heartedly searching but not finding. The poster and the blurb and really misleading...he never has a moment in which he finds new life through the new music, and he never leaps for joy, or for anything else.
He goes to America and rents a small boat, which he drives down a river (the Mississipi?) through the bayous, but he never quite finds the local music that he's apparently after...just more people playing German polkas, and then Czechs playing Tex-Czech polkas. He almost makes friends along the way, but not quite. And it mainly gets bleaker and bleaker.
Watched in the Middle Floor at Springhill, from an old-fashioned DVD.
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