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Western
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The cleverest thing about Western is its title. Contemporary road movies, from Easy Rider (1969) and Kings of the Road (1975) to Take Care of Your Scarf, Tatjana (1995), have often wryly invoked the creed of the Western genre as men, the last of a dying breed, hit the open road in search of freedom. Even more acutely, these road movies are about the limits and paradoxes of such freedom – particularly when our itinerant heroes either confront or flee the possibility of committed relationships with women. And that, too, is classic theme of the Old West in cinema: the kind of ambivalence towards home, marriage and family that the anti-hero John Wayne experienced in The Searchers (1956), for instance. The endless Gypsy Kings-style guitar strumming on the soundtrack of Manuel Poirier's Western could easily be interrupted by a blast of the old cowboy standard "Don't Fence Me In". Paco (Sergi López) and Nino (Sacha Bourdo) are two displaced guys wandering the winds of Brittany. They make an odd couple: Paco is earthy but, initially at least, a conventional type; while Nino is a ragged, devil-may-care bohemian, more in sync with life on the road. The relations that these chaps enjoy with women are not what one initially expects. Poirier milks some fun from the inevitable reversal of type: where Paco seems able to attract intimate female company endlessly, Nino comes up empty-handed at every turn. But, eventually digging deeper, the story engineers another twist: it seems that Nino may finally have a better chance at a fulfilling, lasting relationship than the more overtly romantic Paco. Western is, for the most part, a listless and uninteresting film, trading shamelessly on its one novelty element – the glimpse it offers of "another France" rarely seen on screen, multi-cultural and non-cosmopolitan. There are moments of charm, humour and acute social observation, but all too few to support yet another lazy variation on the road movie formula. This film continues the dismal string of mediocre foreign movies released on the Australian arthouse circuit. Distributors in this field now complain that subtitled films are a huge commercial risk – partly because of the negative reviews they receive. But this reception on the part of critics is not a philistine backlash against the grand ideal of art cinema – it is a cry for better, more daring and important films. Australian film lovers in the late '90s found themselves turning to SBS TV (in its boldest era) or the World Movies cable channel (in its nascent days) for such recent masterpieces as Téchiné's Thieves (1996) or Hou's Good Men, Good Women (1995). The loss of nerve evident in our boutique cinemas continues to be, by contrast, simply galling. © Adrian Martin May 1998 |
