What Robert Flaherty did with title cards in his silent Nanook of the North, Werner Herzog manages with declamatory voiceover in Happy People: romanticization of the austere, self-reliant lives of hunters and trappers in the icebound north. Herzog does it from the warmth and comfort of an editing suite, where he cut down four hours of a Russian-made anthropological documentary by Dmitry Vasyukov and added his own colorful but sometimes intrusive Herzogian commentary. As always, Herzog is turned on by macho-men in the wilderness, so it makes sense that he falls hard for the Russians who fish and trap sable in the deepest, most cut-off part of Siberia. They are fun to watch as they shape skis out of tree trunks, and hang out with their dogs. Happy people? Perhaps. But there definitely are unhappy people: the native Siberians, who have lost their way with Russian-supplied vodka.
