Although it followed on from the previous hits Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Grande found director John Ford suffering from straitened finances.
After his two mysterious, tightly-coiled and idiosyncratic first features, Neighbouring Sounds and Aquarius, the masterful Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho lets his hair down with an exhilarating, all-guns-blazing venture into genre.
A Fistful of Dynamite and Once Upon a Time in America are Sergio Leone’s films with the most explicit political underpinning. Indeed, given recent events, A Fistful of Dynamite is a thoroughly pertinent film, asking how we might achieve social change when the only human resource to hand is venal and self-serving.
The canonical town-taming Western High Noon brought Gary Cooper the 1952 Academy Award for Best Actor (his second).
French director Jacques Audiard is a master at genre with a twist, most famously the prison drama A Prophet, but also a number of crime thrillers with atypical settings or themes, including The Beat that my Heart Skipped (classical music), Dheepan (political refugees) and Read My Lips (office politics). Audiard turns genre templates upside down, sometimes merges them, invariably with excellent results.
A cannily crafted biographical docudrama about the Lakota Sioux broncobuster and horse trainer Brady Jandreau – playing himself as Brady Blackburn – The Rider will resonate with anyone whose dreams have gone up in smoke. Jandreau was 20 when, on April 1, 2016, a horse stomped on his skull, fracturing it in three places, severely damaging two regions of his brain, and penetrating it with bone fragments caked in manure and sand. Defying doctors’ orders, he walked out of hospital shortly after having life-saving brain surgery. Six weeks after returning home he began training horses again. The video footage of Jandreau/Blackburn pulling staples out of his head is real.
The Chinese-American filmmaker Chloe Zhao got to know Jandreau when she was making her promising 2015 debut feature Songs My Brothers Taught Me about life on the impoverished Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Seeking a way to build a new movie around Jandreau, she was inspired by his recovery from his catastrophic accident, only five months after which filming began. Jandreau gives an affectingly low-key performance as the melancholy, laconic Brady Blackburn.
At the heart of The Rider is the sombre recognition that, for many poor young men in the West, not least Native Americans, becoming a rodeo rider is the only way of escaping a hand-to-mouth existence. With a metal plate holding his head together, Brady dare not enter the arena on horseback again though, at one point, temptation proves too much.
Zhao’s direction is cool and objective, scarcely lyrical. Jandreau’s affectionate, learning-impaired teenage sister Lilly plays herself movingly; their father Tim portrays himself as a gambler, harsh and selfish. Jandreau’s childhood friend Lane Scott, a one-time bull-rider who was paralysed in a car accident, also appears. Brady twice visits Lane in his care facility and helps him with rehabilitation exercises, such as rocking on a saddle – haunting scenes that are testament to the human spirit but also indicate Jandreau’s comparative good fortune. Correlative to Brady’’s recuperation – and perhaps to Lane’s – is his tender breaking and training of a volatile wild horse that heartbreakingly comes to grief.
One extra only accompanies The Rider's DVD release – and it’s riveting. Jandreau participates, with British psychologist Dr Chloe Paidoussis-Mitchell, in a 45-mimute post-screening on-stage interview that reveals his charisma as a smart, optimistic young cowboy more truthful than Hollywood would ever allow. Happily, he wants to act again.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for The Rider
Realistic open world games need the little touches to convince you of the reality within which you play. Perhaps it’s your character’s beard that grows a little more each day, maybe it’s the way mud builds up on his boots during wet weather, or how he makes a cup of coffee and talks to members of his 20-strong gang in the morning.
The “portmanteau” form of film-making is almost guaranteed to deliver patchy results, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen brothers’ six-pack of tall tales from the Old West (screened at London Film Festival), can’t quite avoid this age-old trap. But it gives it a helluva good try, and even its less successful portions offer much to enjoy.
Even for those with only a passing acquaintance with Irish history, the Famine – or the Great Hunger – looms large, when British indifference to the failed potato crop in large parts of Ireland resulted in the deaths or emigration of nearly a quarter of the country’s population in the 1840s and 1850s.
Men in a wilderness, uneasy interaction with the locals, a horse… German director Valeska Grisebach’s third feature Western certainly does not lack the staples of genre that her title suggests. But there’s a vulnerable heart to this tale of cross-cultural bonding, with accompanying ruminations about changing human landscapes and fate, that moves it far beyond the expected.
We first meet her protagonists, a group of German construction workers, at their dour backwater home base as they’re preparing for the next job, and sense something of the group’s dynamics. But the assignment ahead isn’t at home; instead they’re setting off as migrant workers – not in the sense we usually associate with that term, of course, a nice touch in itself – to work on a hydroelectric project in a remote region of Bulgaria. It’s no standard EU gravy-train scheme though, but hard work in the heat, and conditions and resources aren’t as expected.
There’s a degree of laconic comment, from both sides, that the last time there were Germans in these parts was 70 years ago
It’s a world, too, in which they are western, set diametrically apart from an east that has only recently emerged from basic Communism: “like time travel” is how one of the Germans describes it. They’re holed up in an isolated compound amid forests, surrounded by glorious mountainous scenery; provisions have been laid in, including a generous supply of beer, but from the moment someone hoists a German flag over the place, we sense that these journeymen haven’t majored in multiculturalism. There are initial hints at concealed threat – “they see us, but we can’t see them” – that comes somehow from the locality itself, then an incident at the river where the group’s boorish foreman Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek) commits a faux pas with some local women establishes a further negative accent.
Grisebach has already set up her main character, the older, grizzled and mustachioed Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), as the loner in the group, with an accompanying tension between him and his boss. He’s the first to venture into the local village, riding a white horse he has found grazing wild, an unlikely cowboy to fulfil the mission of the genre. His sad eyes speak more than words, which is just as well because communication with the locals – some are open, others initially hostile – is mostly by gesture, monosyllabic at best; there’s a degree of laconic comment, from both sides, that the last time there were Germans in these parts was 70 years ago.
A sense of slow bonding develops between Meinhard and the villagers – he’s an unintrusive presence as they get on with their lives, and their instinctive openness resurfaces – and a particular close link develops between him and the boss of the local quarry, the effective village headman, Adrian (Syuleyman Alilov Letifov: pictured above, with Meinhard Neumann). There’s a degree of conflict too, clearly necessary for dramatic purposes, not least because the water supply doesn’t allow for watering local crops if the outsiders take it to mix their concrete, as well as much more affecting intersections of fate.
Just occasionally some such elements feel a very small bit formulaic, but Western’s heart is absolutely true: Grisebach avoids sentimentalising such growing contacts between locals and incomers. And these two worlds aren’t so remote, after all: if the village looks empty, it’s because the young are working abroad – in Germany, Britain or the US – while linguistic contact comes through those who have returned from such sojourns. The melancholy of Meinhard, his emotions expressed so powerfully by facial intonations, hints that he even might find a greater rootedness here than whatever tenuous links attach him to life in Germany, but again that’s underplayed: Grisebach is far too subtle.
It would be so easy to say that Neumann gives a performance of remarkable, quiet power and searing mournfulness, except that – as a non-professional, like all of Grisebach’s cast – he can hardly be said to be giving a performance at all. The director works extensively with improvisation, both with her own development of story and the elements of script she gives her actors in advance. We can only guess at how such levels of total immersion, particularly from her Bulgarian cast, were achieved, as well as at the investments of time and empathy involved from all sides. The effort is repaid on every level, its slow contemplation of life in a particular small corner of the world speaking far beyond such modest boundaries, and connections established across languages and cultures. Western is a film with a very special cadence indeed.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Western