Western

In the arid and mountainous frontier, a group of hardy men are assembled to achieve some objective -- perhaps, it is a cattle drive or mining or defending a cavalry post.  One of the pioneers is laconic and has a mysterious background; he is thought to have killed many men.  Everyone drinks too much and conflicts arise over poker, women, and water rights.  Inevitably, a confrontation ensues between the pioneers and the tribe living in the area.  The mysterious gunman takes action and, then, his combat skills no longer needed, recedes into the frontier darkness.

This is the general premise of the German director Valeska Grisebach's 2017 film, Western.  Shot in the wilds of Bulgaria, the movie features a cast of non-professional actors, mostly selected, it seems, for their rugged good looks.  Grisebach says that she watched many American Westerns when she was growing up in West Germany and she models her film  (she says) on Henry King's The Gunfighter, John Ford's My Darling Clementine, and Anthony Mann's Winchester 73.  Notwithstanding its plot, Western is an austere art-house film, with influences in Antonioni and the Rumanian new wave particularly Corneliu Porumboi and Radu Jude.  Grisebach's cowboys are a group of German construction workers dispatched to a remote part of Bulgaria to build a hydroelectric power station.  The leader of the construction workers is the foreman, Vincent, a man with a malign babyface, recently estranged from his wife.  Vincent clashes with Meinhard, a new addition to the crew and the film's apparent hero.  Meinhard has a weathered face (too many years riding the range) and seems to be a loner.  He is a man of few words, although he has said enough to let it be known that he has seen combat in Iraq and Afghanistan (and may have been a member of the French foreign legion).  These claims seem more than a little questionable.  The German construction crew approaches their job with a considerable degree of arrogance -- they blithely plan to re-route an entire river, maul the terrain with huge construction equipment, and flirt  aggressively with local women.  The German cowboys, as it were, even post a large German flag over their encampment.  Only Meinhard has any interest in the local people.  He wanders around in the village a few miles from the encampment and, after being initially rejected (the village shopkeeper won't sell him a cigarette let alone a beer), becomes friends with some of the people in the dusty arid town.  Meinhard's friendship with the villagers creates hostility with Vincent, not helped by Meinhard getting a big crane stuck in the middle of the river near construction site.  Initially, Vincent also creates a bad impression by taking a local woman's hat and playing "keep away" with it as the men and girls swim together.  Communication problems are rife:  the Germans don't know Bulgarian and the Bulgarian's know only smatterings of German.  (This problem seems a bit fabulous -- in my experience, even uneducated Europeans speaking different languages can communicate with pidgin English.  Here no one knows any English at all notwithstanding the fact that men from the impoverished village are said to have immigrated to North America.) .  Grisebach subtitles the Bulgarian (and the German is subtitled for English-speaking audiences) and so we can clinically see how misunderstandings arise and propagate themselves, at times, something excruciating to watch. Meinhard finds a horse grazing near the construction crew's camp which he tames and rides bareback.  He becomes good friends with the horse's owner, Adrian, a man who also owns a local quarry and may have ties with some kind of organized crime.  The German flag is stolen and, during a poker game, Meinhard wins all the money of one of the villages -- the man later comes to him and begs for the money back and he has a point:  Meinhard won the poker game simply because he had more money to gamble away than the poverty-stricken, unemployed local men.  The presence of the Germans destabilizes the rather fragile local economy.  The village, as it happens, shares its water with two other towns, but the Germans need water to mix their concrete.  When Vincent takes the horse to turn on the water to his camp, the animal stumbles on a steep hill, falls and is badly injured.  A quarrel arises over gravel aggregate from Adrian's quarry.  Everything seems tending toward a final showdown of some sort.

Western achieves an interesting balance of double perspectives.  It's like certain optical illusions that  shift shape as you gaze at them -- is this a hag or a young woman haughtily turning away from you?  Is it a rabbit or a duck?  From one perspective, the construction crew seems to be a group of men struggling to tame the wilderness and surrounding by enigmatic hostiles.  But from another vantage, the German construction crew are wild Indians, invading raiders who threaten the stable, traditional life in the small village.  Similarly, for three-fourth of the film, the strong, silent Meinhard seems to be the hero -- the only member of the German crew willing to meet the locals half-way.  But, by the end of the film, Vincent is partying with the Bulgarian villagers and, in fact, engages in a game of keep-away in the river using the German flag earlier stolen by the locals, a scene that rhymes with, and resolves, the conflict arising from the "keep-away" game with the woman's hat.  By contrast, the eerie Meinhard now seems relegated to the shadows.  After having sex with the attractive local translator, who actually likes Vincent it seems, he becomes further alienated and estranged, lurking in the darkness and brandishing a nasty-looking switchblade.  The movie suggests that Meinhard has gone native -- when a group of men beat him up at the end of the movie, the kindly Adrian says:''Don't worry about it.  It's the kind of thing that happens in small villages."  In the film's final shot, we see Meinhard dancing clumsily with the villages.  He is the sort of man who doesn't fit in anywhere -- and, of course, the movie suggests that he is too restless to be happy with any one or in any place.

The film is about two hours long and features some spectacular landscapes of the mountains on the border with Macedonia.  The editing employs many jump-shots that don't really contribute to the film and, in fact, work against its archetypal form.  Details as to local geography and the customs are vividly established and, even, minor characters have a pungency not often displayed in films -- we can almost smell these people.  The oppressive heat and humidity, the river cutting through little limestone gorges, the hillside thickets, and the small, poor village -- all are effectively and memorably presented.  In this part of Bulgaria, the Germans were regarded as "allies" during World War Two and, oddly enough, the locals recall their presence "seventy years ago" with warmth and affection.  (This reminds us that the history of World War II at what we might regard as its periphery -- for instance, the Balkans -- is fantastically complex.)  The film has a number of blind spots that strain credulity -- it seems doubtful that a group of thuggish construction workers would be unleashed on a remote Bulgarian village without better preparation and some kind of liaison with the local authorities.  (And there seem to be no local authorities -- in keeping with the Western theme, there is no real law and order.)  The details of the construction work, which never seems to advance, are unclear -- a bunch of re-rod stands for a concrete pour that never happens (I assume the budget didn't permit anything more than the nominal foundations we see on screen).  Except for a few short sequences, no one seems to work -- everyone just sits around chain-smoking and getting drunk.  (I think the conceit is that without the gravel to make aggregate no progress can be made on the hydro-electric project).  In this part of the world, people are very religious -- Grisebach, as a modern secular German, has a complete blind spot for religion -- we see a church on one occasion but no one seems to go to it other than the sexually compliant lady translator.  Grisebach's non-ending is suggestive but also something of a cop-out.  Real Westerns conclude with some sort of climax that resolves at least some of the issues.  Grisebach simply complicates the situation to a sort narrative saturation and, then, ends the picture without anything approaching a resolution.  Her answer to this criticism would be classically "art house" -- there are no resolutions in real life.  True enough, but her film isn't exactly a model of realism either and, so, an audience has a right to, at least, hope for some kind of denouement. Despite these objections, it's a pretty good film, exciting enough in its own way, and well worth seeing.