The Settlers (2023)
(Los colonos)
Country: CHI/ARG/GB/TAI/GER/SV/DK/FR
Technical: col/1.50:1 97m
Director: Felipe Gálvez Haberle
Cast: Mark Stanley, Camilo Arancibia, Benjamin Westfall, Alfredo Castro, Sam Spruell, Marcelo Alonso
Synopsis:
At the end of the nineteenth century, speculators and sheep farmers have carved up the island of Tierra del Fuego, and a mestizo finds himself accompanying a renegade Texan and a Scottish ranker, masquerading as a lieutenant, on a punitive mission against the Ona Indian.
Review:
Shot, as has become fashionable, in archaic aspect ratio, this revisionist western is magnificently shot (you can feel the harshness of the landscape and the bone-chilling wind). The native through whose eyes we witness all the atrocities, is brutalised beyond recall, as an epilogue makes clear, and he and we are denied the satisfaction of seeing the perpetrators punished. Along the way, though, there are chilling touches, such as the American who gets on the wrong side of an English colonel, who in turn exacts the toff's revenge of buggery on the upstart private; the wide-eyed but dumb horses (shades of Au hasard Balthazar) who look on appalled; and the liberal politician who appears to want to make amends, but who with his movie camera is more concerned with the 'optics' of change than in any real reparation for what has been done to these people. That said, as in Martel's Zama (2017), the narrative is so spare, the background so thinly sketched in, that some viewers will feel more scandalised than enlightened.
(Los colonos)
Country: CHI/ARG/GB/TAI/GER/SV/DK/FR
Technical: col/1.50:1 97m
Director: Felipe Gálvez Haberle
Cast: Mark Stanley, Camilo Arancibia, Benjamin Westfall, Alfredo Castro, Sam Spruell, Marcelo Alonso
Synopsis:
At the end of the nineteenth century, speculators and sheep farmers have carved up the island of Tierra del Fuego, and a mestizo finds himself accompanying a renegade Texan and a Scottish ranker, masquerading as a lieutenant, on a punitive mission against the Ona Indian.
Review:
Shot, as has become fashionable, in archaic aspect ratio, this revisionist western is magnificently shot (you can feel the harshness of the landscape and the bone-chilling wind). The native through whose eyes we witness all the atrocities, is brutalised beyond recall, as an epilogue makes clear, and he and we are denied the satisfaction of seeing the perpetrators punished. Along the way, though, there are chilling touches, such as the American who gets on the wrong side of an English colonel, who in turn exacts the toff's revenge of buggery on the upstart private; the wide-eyed but dumb horses (shades of Au hasard Balthazar) who look on appalled; and the liberal politician who appears to want to make amends, but who with his movie camera is more concerned with the 'optics' of change than in any real reparation for what has been done to these people. That said, as in Martel's Zama (2017), the narrative is so spare, the background so thinly sketched in, that some viewers will feel more scandalised than enlightened.
(Los colonos)
Country: CHI/ARG/GB/TAI/GER/SV/DK/FR
Technical: col/1.50:1 97m
Director: Felipe Gálvez Haberle
Cast: Mark Stanley, Camilo Arancibia, Benjamin Westfall, Alfredo Castro, Sam Spruell, Marcelo Alonso
Synopsis:
At the end of the nineteenth century, speculators and sheep farmers have carved up the island of Tierra del Fuego, and a mestizo finds himself accompanying a renegade Texan and a Scottish ranker, masquerading as a lieutenant, on a punitive mission against the Ona Indian.
Review:
Shot, as has become fashionable, in archaic aspect ratio, this revisionist western is magnificently shot (you can feel the harshness of the landscape and the bone-chilling wind). The native through whose eyes we witness all the atrocities, is brutalised beyond recall, as an epilogue makes clear, and he and we are denied the satisfaction of seeing the perpetrators punished. Along the way, though, there are chilling touches, such as the American who gets on the wrong side of an English colonel, who in turn exacts the toff's revenge of buggery on the upstart private; the wide-eyed but dumb horses (shades of Au hasard Balthazar) who look on appalled; and the liberal politician who appears to want to make amends, but who with his movie camera is more concerned with the 'optics' of change than in any real reparation for what has been done to these people. That said, as in Martel's Zama (2017), the narrative is so spare, the background so thinly sketched in, that some viewers will feel more scandalised than enlightened.