Funny you should mention this, Paul. I bought the Thai DVD last week and watched the movie tonight; I imagine that my response is almost the complete opposite of yours--I really enjoyed it.
Some of the dialogue fell flat, and I think that by and large this was due to Ledoyen and Sanchez-Gijon's dialogue being too sculpted and lacking any sense of spontaneity: in particular, Ledoyen seemed to be performing as if she was in a Harold Pinter play, with... meaningful pauses... before random... words. However, this issue to one side I enjoyed just about everything else about the movie, so I'm more than willing to forgive those foibles.
I've pasted the below from the notes I took in my diary:
Early in the movie, Gary Oldman's character asserts that 'There are only hunters and prey: that's the only fucking truth in this world', and at the core of the film is Paddy Considine's transformation from 'prey' to 'hunter'. There's a lovely moment at the end of the film in which our sympathies are questioned, and much like the climax of STRAW DOGS we're asked to question the myth of violence as an index of masculinity.
The English tourists are painted as colonisers who don't understand the community that they're interfering with; where the girl they think they're rescuing is physically handicapped and is as much a victim of the tourists' pity and 'cultured' sensibilities as she is a victim of her imprisonment by her family, the tourists themselves are handicapped by their lack of cultural understanding. This is a point that is hammered home near the end of the film: Virginie Ledoyen yells at Considine, telling him that 'You don't understand', and Considine responds by asserting that he finally 'understands'; then Considine, who does not speak Spanish, is asked by a local (in Spanish), 'Do you understand?' Of course, Considine may think he understands, but he does not: he doesn't understand the language or the culture. The gender conflict is clearly delineated too; both of these thematic areas are underscored by the use of Leonard Cohen's 'There is a War' ('There is a war between the rich and poor, a war between the man and the woman'). It's a strong and pertinent message for our time: don't patronise and interfere with or take selfish pity on cultures that you can't fully comprehend. (Even Oldman's character, who has old family ties with the community, struggles to fully understand the situation until it's too late.)
I loved the film's focus on the culture clash between the locals and the tourists, and the selfconscious play on the imagery of the Western genre. It's a very pomo film in a lot of ways; the idea of setting the film in 1978 (although the trailer states that the film is set during 1976--did you notice that?) meant that there was no interference from the mobile telephones and laptops that seem to crop up in just about every genre film nowadays--a particular bugbear of mine. (There's nothing less cinematic than watching someone sending a text message on a mobile telephone or typing away on a laptop.)
Serra's handling of narrative isn't brilliant: there were perhaps too many stops and starts for my tastes (for example, there's an interminable conversation between Ledoyen and Considine that seemed to stop the film dead in its tracks). However, there's an interesting theme bubbling away in this film which, for me, made it more than just the sum of its parts (i.e. more than just a pastiche of STRAW DOGS or DELIVERANCE et al).
Cheers,
Paul
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Topic: The Backwoods / Bosque de sombras (Koldo Serra, 2006) (Read 8515 times)