Maybe we should make up a new genre? Maybe it can be called the neo-Western. Then again, I can't help but feel the word "acid" should be in there somewhere.
Anywho, Slow West shares the same odd lineage of movies like Dead Man and Jauja. From the former comes the racial commentary and cheeky sense of humor and from the latter comes the bright, colorful palette. And though it's clearly the least of the three it's still a refreshing and sprightly little film. It has to be to earn those comparisons.
What makes these three movies seem of a piece is the degree of abstraction they use when fooling around with Western iconography. While the Spaghetti Western of Sergio Leone distills and concentrates the genre to a heightened mythicality, these movies move a step further. Their "West" and its attending tropes aren't mythologized versions of real world things. They're primarily metaphors. Where Leone uses the iconography to evoke an intensified emotional scale, these movies use the iconography for symbolic significance and cultural baggage. The end results are something like essays on the Western as filtered through tone poems. So far, I'm really into them.
No comments:
Post a Comment