Valeska Grisebach (2017)
More than a decade has passed since the German writer-director Valeska Grisebach’s previous feature Longing (2006), which I liked, though it’s now a distant memory. I don’t know the explanation for the long interval between Longing and Western but it’s a pity Grisebach’s output is so slender because this latest film (only her third feature in sixteen years) is another good one. I’m glad I didn’t read the Sight & Sound (May 2018) review by Elena Gorfinkel, used by BFI as their programme note, before seeing Western. Gorfinkel is a senior lecturer in film studies at King’s College London and it shows. Her offputting piece informs us that ‘Grisebach’s sights are set on the reticent subjectivities of male characters’, that the new film’s title ‘summons the wide-open expanses of the ur-genre, the Hollywood western’, and so on.
Although freighted with cinematic meaning, the title turns out to have a dual meaning. It’s both a reference to a movie tradition and a description of Grisebach’s protagonist and other characters, in distinction from another community in the film. Western concerns a bunch of German construction workers on a project to build a hydroelectric plant in rural Bulgaria. Much of the drama centres on suspicions and conflicts between and within the groups of western and eastern Europeans in the story – and particularly on tensions that arise as the main character Meinhard gravitates socially towards the Germans’ Bulgarian hosts. Very few of either nationality can speak a language other than their own and there are plenty of crossed wires. In the circumstances, the English subtitling of the German and Bulgarian dialogue seems to make life almost too easy for the Anglophone viewer but this doesn’t obscure the picture Grisebach builds up of things understood, not understood and misunderstood across the language divide.
Grisebach weaves in a succession of Hollywood western tropes: an awesome and obdurate terrain; new arrivals imposing themselves on the natives of the region; competing models of manhood; a horse; a poker game; a mysterious, taciturn hero. As in Longing, she uses actors with no prior professional experience. Perhaps they’ve no professional ambitions either (none of the main cast members of Longing has added to their sole IMDB credit in the twelve years since) but there are two performers in particular you’d look forward to seeing again. Syuleyman Alilov Letifov, who plays the Bulgarian quarry owner Adrian, is emotionally alert and eloquent. In the main role, Meinhard Neumann is a marvel. Wiry and limber, Neumann conveys a remarkable quality of isolation just in the way that he stands. His weather-beaten face and sad eyes are a landscape in themselves. Meinhard’s need for a set of personal connections that he lacks is conveyed subtly and strongly.
It takes time to engage with Western but it’s increasingly absorbing. The first time the film really grabs attention is when the Germans, on a day off, go swimming in a lake and their boorish foreman Vincent (Reinhardt Wetrek) harasses a young Bulgarian woman Vyara (Vyara Borisova), who’s trying to bathe. The scene centres on Vincent’s getting hold of Vyara’s hat and taunting her to retrieve it from him. The clash between them is echoed in a later sequence: the German flag that the visitors flew above their accommodation and which vanished, reappears in Bulgarian hands and gets dunked in the lake. This time, Vincent is the one struggling to get something back. The most upsetting episode involves the fall and prolonged agony of Adrian’s white horse. Grisebach gives the narrative an increasing sense of foreboding. This becomes so strong that, although the film stops without much having been resolved, the inconclusive ending is less a frustration than a relief. The only music takes the form of songs playing on radios and, in the closing stages, over the public address at a local carnival. Regardless of the number of people in a shot, Grisebach arranges them to admirably natural effect. Nothing and no one in Western looks obviously choreographed.
20 April 2018
