9. Oharu - Life Of Oharu
Oharu is the protagonist of Life of Oharu, Kenji Mizoguchis 1952 classic intended to show the tragic life of one woman in order to illustrate the social difficulties faced by all women in Japan at the time. With this in mind, imagine that everything that could go wrong for her goes wrong. A brief but not exhaustive list: her lover is executed and she and her family are banished; she attempts suicide; she is forced to chop off her hair; her husband is killed during a robbery; she cant find her son; she becomes a prostitute but fails at it; she ends up a beggar. Oharu is the ultimate unfortunate character really, and would have been #1 if I were clever enough to structure this article properly in some sort of order.
8. Stroszek
The eponymous Bruno Stroszek is a strange man in the strange world of Werner Herzog (the same Werner Herzog who made a documentary about eating his shoe), so when I tell you that after committing armed robbery and only earning $32, which they use to go shopping immediately, Bruno carries a large frozen turkey into his truck, fills the truck up with beer and drives off to the mountains, where he shoots himself on a ski lift. But what makes him so unlucky? At the beginning of the film he stands up for a prostitute and is beaten up by her pimps, who also break his accordion (the worst of crimes). Eva, the prostitute, then leaves with him to go from Germany to Wisconsin. She tires of him, however, and leaves him, heading off to Vancouver. And then he loses his home, his dreams as broken as his accordion. These events leave him in one of those situations where the only logical step is to buy a frozen turkey.