voyager (1991)

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Volker Schlöndorff

Sam Shepard

Walter Faber

Julie Delpy

Barbara Sukowa

Dieter Kirchlechner

Herbert Hencke

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Currently available on 12 streaming services.

Voyager (1991)

Original title: homo faber.

117min - English

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Walter Faber has survived a crash with an airplane. His next trip is by ship. On board this ship he meets the enchanting Sabeth and they have a passionate love affair. Together they travel to her home in Greece, but the rational Faber doesn't know what fate has in mind for him for past doings.

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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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Release details.

• Duration: 117 mins

Cast and crew

• Director: Volker Schlöndorff
• Screenwriter: Rudy Wurlitzer
• Sam Shepard
• Julie Delpy
• Barbara Sukowa
• Dieter Kirchlechner
• Deborah Lee-Furness
• August Zirner

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Movie's ratings

• Kinorium 6.9 100+
• IMDb 6.7 3569
• Critics 56% 9

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Critique: 1

Voyager starts in mystery, and intrigues us. It continues with intelligence, and absorbs us. And then it ends in melodrama, and disappoints us.

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Directed by Volker Schlöndorff

Destiny is the most powerful coincidence of all.

Walter Faber has survived a crash with an airplane. His next trip is by ship. On board this ship he meets the enchanting Sabeth and they have a passionate love affair. Together they travel to her home in Greece, but the rational Faber doesn't know what fate has in mind for him for past doings.

Sam Shepard Julie Delpy Barbara Sukowa Traci Lind Deborra-Lee Furness Dieter Kirchlechner August Zirner Thomas Heinze Bill Dunn Peter Berling Lorna Farrar Kathleen Matiezen Lou Cutell Charley Hayward Wynn Irwin James Mathers Perla Walter Roland De Chandenay Jacques Martial Brigitte Catillon Philippe Morier-Genoud Erica Lawson Johnny Vavouras

Director Director

Volker Schlöndorff

Producers Producers

Eberhard Junkersdorf Bodo Scriba

Writers Writers

Rudy Wurlitzer James Ragan Volker Schlöndorff

Original Writer Original Writer

Casting casting.

Pat Golden Sabine Schroth

Editor Editor

Dagmar Hirtz

Cinematography Cinematography

Giorgos Arvanitis Pierre Lhomme

Executive Producers Exec. Producers

Vasilis Katsoufis Klaus Hellwig

Production Design Production Design

Nikos Perakis

Art Direction Art Direction

Benedikt Herforth

Composer Composer

Stanley Myers

Costume Design Costume Design

Barbara Baum

Makeup Makeup

Leta Andreadi Edwin Erfmann Hannelore Faber Emily Katz Athina Tseregof Katerina Varthalitou

Hairstyling Hairstyling

Linda De Andrea Yola Leventi Rosa Luciani Katerina Moletti Niki Psimouli Fotini Xenaki

Stefi 2 Neue Bioskop Film

Germany France UK Greece

Primary Language

Spoken languages.

English German

Releases by Date

21 mar 1991, 16 jan 1994, 20 may 1994, releases by country.

• Theatrical 12+
• Theatrical 12

117 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by Richard Chandler ★★★ 4

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

"What's providence got to do with it?"

With his twenty-year marriage to fellow director Margarethe von Trotta on life support, the highly international Volker Schlöndorff felt moved to adapt Max Frisch's psychosexual novel Homo Faber (retitled Voyager for stateside audiences largely unfamiliar with the Swiss author), wherein a hazardous crash landing provokes an inconceivable chain of coincidences that unsettle the smugly rationalistic beliefs of misogynistic, dispassionate engineer Walter Faber (Sam Shepard). Walter is the sort that brags about not reading fiction and how he enjoys "waking up and not having to explain myself to a woman"—that is to say an insufferable prick who hides behind a principle of forthrightness.

Fleeing an unwanted girlfriend in New York, Walter embarks on an…

Review by munta ★★★★

Classic julie delpy always flirting with the passengers

Review by themozzfather ★★ 4

Volker Schlöndorff - »Homo faber (1991)«

🇩🇪🇨🇭🇦🇹 Heimattour 🇩🇪🇨🇭🇦🇹 Community-Weekend 19.-21.04.2024

Reiseland: Deutschland, ja und auch Schweiz und auch Venezuela,USA ,Mexiko,Guatemala?, Frankreich,Italien,Griechenland glaub das war fast alles Reiseleiter: Andy Fell und

Challenge 2024 – deutschsprachige Filme -----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Beim Mediatheken durchsuchen, bin ich bei 3Sat noch auf diesen scheinbar interessanten Stoff gestoßen. Doch was soll ich sagen, dass stellt sich dann doch als sehr mieser Film heraus. Vielleicht ist die Wertung am Ende auch zu kritisch. Aber der Film war schon ein echtes Ärgernis für mich.

Der Ingenieur Walter Faber (Sam Shepard) hat eine sachliche Einstellung zum Leben. Als Realist hält er nicht viel von Zufall und Schicksalsfügung. Diese Einstellung sollte jedoch auf seiner Reise, die uns Max Frisch lesen und…

Review by Jay-Em ★★ 2

Eine absolut enttäuschende Umsetzung. Inhaltlich verfehlt er vollkommen den Kern der Vorlage. Walter Faber ist hier mehr Patrick Bateman als Walter Faber. Nur die Cinematographie war wunderschön😍

Review by hangezoeswife ★★½

faber ist MEIN patrick bateman

Review by dudewithbacon ★★★

Voyager is an odd film, one minute it feels off, the next its good...then its anything but. What starts as a bit of a slag, turns into a fairly competent romance, and then devastates with its twist, which sadly, lead to a series of bad decisions that tarnished the third act in an otherwise perfectly watchable film. It isn't to say the movie becomes unwatchable because of it, its just borderline soap-opera level ridiculous, and makes the whole experience feel somewhat cheap.

Voyager tells the story of Walter Faber, an engineer who travels the world doing business lectures. He's very matter of fact, dry, humorless, and shuns anything that doesn't exist within the more tangible realms of reality, opting to…

Review by audrey ★★★★★

Call me crazy but for some reason I really resonate with this film. After watching it for the first time I was blown away by the beauty and tragedy of it all - which hit even harder the second time around.

I remember reading something in a Sam Shepard biography about how after he exited a restaurant in a scene where his and Julie Delpy's characters are separating, the director called cut but Shepard didn't come back inside; somebody found him outside in tears and saying something along the lines of "I don't want anybody to ever leave me again." That emotional poignancy throughout his performance is present and makes this my favorite role of his - I desperately wish…

Review by elias ★★★ 2

what kind of before sunrise is this

Obscure 80s/90s Films Binge #164

I honestly really loved this movie and wasn't expecting to at all. I feel like the reviews on here water down the message of the film and don't fully capture the tone towards its subject matter.

The '50s period detail was excellent and I liked that it was more subtle but always present. The inclusion of the Super 8 footage was such a clever creative choice. Loved the locations - the museums in Paris and the Grecian landscapes were stunning and had a mystifying quality that added to the dream-like effect.

Sam Shepard was wonderful as the lead, I wish I could fully describe his presence. He had this wall up that slowly started to…

Review by TecatePapi ★

This is one of those movies you watch where you start to remember there are actors you like and you know they're working somewhere but you just don't know where but you know they're in things. This is that thing. Sam Shepard is the actor.

The plot is bizarre. The characters are almost offensively pompous. A good chunk of this movie takes place on a cruise ship. I guess Sabeth needed to develop Stockholm Syndrome to make this plot work.

There's a conversation where Sabeth (Julie Delpy) talks about existentialism and asks, "Have you ever heard of Camus?" like a shitty arts student who averages a B. The ones who do the readings and go to all the classes but…

Review by Olivia Harrison

worst case scenario

Review by cinematisch ★★½

Very mediocre due to its limited possibilities through the literary basis, or how my teacher would say: der is sowas von genial!

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Voyager (1991)

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Walter Faber

Herbert Hencke

Joachim Hencke

Lady Stenographer

New York Doorman

Restroom Attendant

UNESCO Delegate

African Unesco

Musician (uncredited)

Benedikt Herforth

Art Direction

Nikos Perakis

Production Design

Giorgos Arvanitis

Director of Photography

Pierre Lhomme

Costume & Makeup

Agnès Tassel

Assistant Makeup Artist

Barbara Baum

Costume Design

Fotini Xenaki

Hairstylist

Katerina Moletti

Linda De Andrea

Niki Psimouli

Rosa Luciani

Yola Leventi

Athina Tseregof

Makeup Artist

Edwin Erfmann

Hannelore Faber

Katerina Varthalitou

Leta Andreadi

Volker Schlöndorff

Dagmar Hirtz

Sabine Schroth

Bodo Scriba

Co-Producer

Klaus Hellwig

Executive Producer

Vasilis Katsoufis

Eberhard Junkersdorf

Stanley Myers

Original Music Composer

James Ragan

Rudy Wurlitzer

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• Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert Voyager starts in mystery, and intrigues us. It continues with intelligence, and absorbs us. And then it ends in melodrama, and disappoints us.
• Film Threat Caffeinated Clint Highly entertaining, Incredibly moving
• Dennis Schwartz Movie Reviews Dennis Schwartz Only bearable for throwing out a number of alluring literary ideas, otherwise it's bogged down by an overload of symbolism.
• Spirituality & Practice Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat A mesmerizing interpretation of a Max Frisch novel about a globe-trotting engineer.

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Voyager (1991)

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Aug. 18, 1991: Soviet Coup

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

August 17, 1998 / 1:18 PM EDT / CBS

On Aug. 18, 1991, Soviet hard-liners launched a coup aimed at toppling President Mikhail Gorbachev, who was vacationing in the Crimea; Gorbachev's dasha was surrounded by Soviet military and KGB forces.

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, announced that Gorbachev was suffering from health problems, and that Vice President Gennady Yanayev was assuming power as president. An eight-man committee was formed to rule the country. The committee declared a state of emergency as hundreds of tanks and armored personnel carriers moved into Moscow.

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