Reflections from a Young Movie-goer
I
somehow managed to watch three other films in my break from writing
on here; Man Bites
Dog,
Jean Luc Godard's Le
Mepris and
What We Do in the
Shadows.
For the first film I was only half-alert, but the other two I sat
down and watched and enjoyed greatly. I won't do a full review on
either of them now, but might reflect on them in future (I think Le
Mepris might
be one of the best films I've ever seen). I had Roman Polanski's
Rosemary's Baby
next
on my schedule, but wasn't able to watch it last night. I did,
however, watch something which I was just as interested in, Slow
West.
I'm not overly-familiar with the Western genre, the extent of my watching includes The Searchers, No Country for Old Men, Django Unchained and bits of old Westerns on TV. Only one of these did I really enjoy; The Searchers. The latter two, while I appreciated them and really like some of their respective directors' other work, left me cold. I felt that the primary problem I had with both films was their actual attempts at the genre, despite my own inexperience with it (or perhaps because of my own experience with it). The only Tarantino films I've truly enjoyed were Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. I feel that his trademark is making style look like substance; if you don't enjoy the style, there won't be any substance. The three other Coen Brothers films I've seen: Fargo, The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Where Art Thou? have all been excellent. I think the main problem with No Country, which isn't really a problem with the film itself, was the fact that I'd previously read the book by Cormac McCarthy and preferred it a lot more. I'm not a believer in the “books are always better” argument and I think that film adaptations create something new altogether. But McCarthy's style complemented the plot a lot better than the Coen Brothers'. The Searchers feels a lot more daring and innovative as a western, compared to the other old westerns I'd seen bits of. It's dark and complex in its themes while epic and picturesque in length, and the modern viewer can revel in all its vintage western wonder. The other two films, though, tread similar ground in terms of morality, bringing not enough new to the screen.
Based on this trend, I didn't think I'd find much to like in Slow
West, John Maclean's first full length feature starring Michael
Fassbender and Kodi Smit-McPhee. The plot is simple and, as the title
suggests, slow; Smit-McPhee plays a 16 year old Scottish boy who
travels west across America in search of a girl he loves, who also
emigrated from Scotland with her father. He runs into a bounty
hunter, played by Fassbender, and pays him for protection. The bounty
hunter soon discovers that the girl and her father are wanted and are
being tracked by another gang of bounty hunters. It balances
traditional western tropes with an offbeat, indie sensibility which
fit together near-perfectly. This quirky sensibility allows it to
approach the western tropes with a humour and a depth one would
usually associate with European films. Needless to say, I was
pleasantly surprised.
Slow West feels like it innovates its genre. The diverse range of
ethnicities we see; Congolese, Scottish, Swedish, Native American
(not to mention the bounty hunter's mixed heritage) drifting across a
dangerous and largely unconquered land makes it feel truly wild,
exciting and primordial. Along with an interesting score, the
locations (its actually shot in New Zealand) bring a fairy-tale
beauty to the mix, adding to this whole sense of
genre-revitalisation. This is the main difference between it and
films such as Django Unchained, it only takes from the Western
genre what it really needs to. When watching Django, I felt
that Tarantino was trying to cram in everything he knew about
Westerns, which made it seem more like a facsimile than anything.
Slow West, on the other hand, is a lot more lean and refined.
Lasting only 84 minutes, its slow but not sprawling, and the mastery
of its story telling means it never seems gimicky or self-indulgent.
Ultimately, its a story about two universal elements; love and death,
which it handles with all the mythicising absurdism of a western. But
it has an exotic freshness and black humour which summon up many,
many names before the likes of John Ford. But, above all, it engages
the viewer on an emotional level, something which neither No
Country for Old Men or Django Unchained did. Overall, it
is this quality, with its fairy-tale simplicity, that makes all of
the film's other innovations truly shine. I would like to see more
films like Slow West in the future. Another film which I
imagine to be just as innovative is A Girl Walks Home Alone at
Night, tagged as the first "Iranian Vampire Western",
although I'm guessing it innovates in a completely different way.
Despite my inexperience in the genre and my dislike of half the films
I've seen from it, I would still say I have a lot of time for the
Western.
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