🎬 #149 The Power Of Primal.
In the modern, developed parts of the world we live in a cosy belt. Far from what our ancestors had to deal with - the prospect of starvation or being mauled to death by some ancient animal or competing tribe. We’re lucky in that sense. But also, I feel like this insulating factor the modern world provides us - numbs us to the special-ness of just being alive. When you’re viscerally aware that you might starve to death in the winter / be killed at any moment while on a hunt - I imagine that keeps your senses pretty sharpened towards appreciation. To the point that just having a peaceful moment by a fire, in your cave, feels incredible - or walking in the rain feels like a salvation few of us today are attuned to. Being comfortable separates us from the powerful teacher of discomfort.
Luckily though, we have films like this to remind us.
Happy choosing, happy viewing
Bry
FILM ONE: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
2007 Dir Joel and Ethan Cohen
2 hrs 2 mins
According to Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem - playing Anton Chigurh above - was depressed during the making of the film. Mainly because of his hair. But also because the filmmakers wanted his character to be very pale, so he was constantly kept out of the sun resulting in depleted Vitamin D levels, I imagine. Also can’t help but think that the fact he’s playing an elemental psychopath probably added to the hair thing.
Chirgurh feels as much a part of the ancient landscape as any mountains or open expanse of desert in Deakins’ beautifully framed establishers. A dark force of nature, a storm that follows its own unknowable logic as he hunts down Brolin’s Llewellyn Moss. A hunter who just happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I hadn’t seen the film in a long time and seeing it again, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the first Terminator. An unstoppable force chasing its target, mixed in with a bit of self surgery.
Though this film exists without the comforting narrative logic of Terminator, this one unfolds seemingly with random happenstance. A powerful depiction of a universe not guided by anything but violence and greed. In fact, the actions of the film are really set in motion when Moss succumbs to a moment of humanity. It’s the inhumane Chigurh who seems immune to any fatal effects. This is classic bleak McCarthy, whose book the film is based on, but it’s beautiful in its own nihilistic ways.
TL;DR: As close as the Coen’s have got to a horror film so far, this is a primal, brutal reminder that there are no free lunches.
*Available for a small rental fee on Apple and Amazon in the US and the UK.
Fact: The filmmakers had to stop filming one day because another little film, ‘There Will Be Blood,’ was shooting nearby and testing their special effects for the oil derrick fire scene. The resulting cloud of smoke was travelling into the Coen’s frame, so they resumed shooting the next day.
FILM TWO: THE SURVIVALIST
2015 Dir Stephen Fingleton
1 hr 44 mins
I’d been meaning to see this film for a while, written and directed by an Irish filmmaker and shot relatively near where I grew up - it felt like I should have seen it. Imagine our primal past but now, or some undesignated point in the future. Desperation, fear and violence take priority over any inclinations of humanity. This is as primal as it gets. The central character is reduced to the bare essentials of survival - shelter, food grown on his small patch of and water. Despite the fact that he’s become more animal than human, those tendencies for humanity keep sneaking through in the form of loneliness. That’s when two women show up and change everything.
I’m so surprised that Fingleton has yet to make another film - this is a tight, horrific depiction of a world without any of the comforts that we’ve grown used to. His direction is restrained and stripped back. Like the main character - he’s focused on efficiency and sustainability. There is a lot of focus on the body here - lean muscle, blood, bodily fluids, again another reminder that we’re animals. Take away the clothes that disguise this, take away modern comforts, and we turn to beasts roaming a desperate landscape. Coiled and ready to strike at anything that encroaches our territory. Capable of acts of violence that seem so unthinkable as to be from another time, medieval. Fingleton’s film doesn’t shy away from any of this - it’s very very bleak, in parts reminding me of Cormac McCarthy’s other novel - The Road. But despite all the bleakness, some humanity can’t help but come through. We can be more than the mechanisms of survival.
TL;DR: Fingleton’s film pulls absolutely no punches - taking us deep into a brutal world of desperate humans without the principles of modern civil society.
*Available to stream on the AMC channel and Shudder in the US and Apple and Amazon in the UK.
Fact: Similar to There Will Be Blood, there’s no dialogue until almost 18 minutes into the film.