There may not be much of a call for strongman acts involving bizarre feats of strength (bending steel rods, pulling barges with one’s teeth), but Luxembourgian Georges Christen seems to be able to make a living doing such stunts – even if it means going to Russia for gigs. The holder of 23 feats of strength accolades from the Guinness Book of World Records, Christen’s Moscow tour is the subject of this 2005 documentary.
Alas, for all of the heaving and flexing, Christen seems unable to carry a conversation. Filmmakers Antoine Prum and Boris Kremer present Christen as a nondescript and fairly boring man who only comes alive during this oddball shows – and even then, Christen seems to be mechanically going through the paces rather than trying to wow the audience.
In comparison, this DVD release offers Japanese TV show footage that appears to be at least 20 years old, where a younger and conspicuously more enthusiastic Christen amazed everyone by bending steel rods with his jaws and inflating and exploding a hot water bottle with his lung power.
Prum and Kremer clearly ran short of usable footage from the Christen trip, so they pad the film with dull travelogue glimpses of Moscow and irrelevant interviews with local woman about their notion of the ideal man. For a production that supposedly celebrates muscular achievement, the film is rather puny.
