Slow West (film)

-

I'm unsure what genre this film would be: it is sweet and dreamy yet contains emotional turmoil and tragedy with a splash of absurdist humour. It could be best described as "philosophical-action". It is set in the wild west days of northern America where the western frontier was abound with lawlessness and life was cheap. The main protagonist is a thin, pale Scottish lad, Jay, with large blue eyes. He has arrived in America and is heading westward in search of his lost love Rose Ross. Rose and her father John were falsely accused of murder and fled Scotland. As per the American dream, they came to start a new life somewhere on the frontier.

Jay is a romantic pacifist without a single violent bone in his body. He looks at the stars, ponders about the natives on the moon and recites poetry. He doesn't know how to shoot a gun nor has the gumption to use it; he is completely hopeless out in the wild. Jay meets Silas (the lone ranger) by happenstance and the two make a deal where Silas will escort Jay safely across the western frontier to Rose in return for a sum of money. Silas is a man of few words that carries a lot of loneliness and pain. He grew up with a gang of bounty hunters but peeled himself away from them to seek a life of peace while at the same time putting a target on his back: a deal with the devil is always hard to break.

Initially, Jay doesn't entirely trust Silas and attempts to make the journey himself. In his final attempt, he gets seduced by Werner: a man of knowledge and wisdom who also ponders about the world and the meaning of it all. There is a segment of a philosophical discussion that takes place between them. Werner is in the process of capturing the knowledge on the lives and culture of the native Indians as, in his opinion, once they are near-extinct and become the minority to the Europeans, their culture and existence will be romanticised and exoticized without any objectivity The two spend the night wondering about time, the universe and fleeting human existence.

The scenery in the film is simply stunning and the white clarity of the sunlight adds a surreal feel to the film. It is fantastic to see the New Zealand landscape presented in its raw beauty without adulteration by any CGI which sometimes happens in other major films set in New Zealand.

As Jay and Silas continue on in their journey, we discover that there is a handsome bounty on Rose and her father and all the bounty hunters are heading out west alongside Jay and Silas. It is a matter of time before they are found dead or alive as $2000 sits on their heads and Jay and Silas must get there before the bounty hunters.

I am unsure what to make of the humour in this film except to compare it to the likes of Park Chan-wook's films (especially Old Boy). It is at times “inappropriate”, but also fun and childlike. For me the humour exalts Slow West into a reflective work of art rather than a standard western as the humour diminishes the dominating force of the violence and brings to focus the hero's journey each human is embarked on.

Popular posts from this blog

The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (book)

-
Image
History rhymes: it moves in cycles of growth, destruction and then further growth; we see intense conflict followed by loving peace, leading to complacency and the withering of what brought the beauty and success to begin with, only to give birth to something greater. Another common historical rhyme is that each age has a wealthy establishment which attempts to suppress information or people that threatens its control: Emperors, Tsars and tycoons. Any serious student of world history, mythology and ideas knows these things to be true.                                                                                                               The Nag Hammadi Scriptures have captured the imagination of seekers around the world because their story and content exemplify the points raised above. In brief, they represent a type of Christianity that flourished between approximately 70 AD to 400 AD but ceased to exist thereafter. They are called gnostic which generally means a direct knowledg
Read more

I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (book)

-
Image
Humanity tends to scapegoat individuals or groups to water the thirst for collective violence or to resolve tensions and angst. The scapegoating mechanism is at the heart of the Western canon: both Socrates and Jesus were put to death to appease the inflamed crowd. According to French American thinker Ren é  Girard, these are extreme, archetypal versions of a phenomena that plays out in lesser forms throughout human life. Girard sits at the crossroads of various traditions but is uniquely brilliant when discussing the role collective violence has in human communities. At the heart of Girard’s work is the notion of mimetic decision-making. By this he means that humans by nature imitate what they see, hear, and read, including in what they desire. The imitators inevitably begin to go after the same things in a world of scarce resources, which increases tensions in the community. Eventually, the tension becomes too great, and the individual or group is selected for scapegoating, whereby t
Read more

The Secret of Light (book)

-
Image
One of the most beautifully written and accessible mystical texts of our time is The Secret of Light by Walter Russell. It captures the truths of esoteric Christianity (such as that found in the sermons of Meister Eckhart), and the Hindu Upanishads, without getting bogged down in unapproachable terminology or culturally-specific mythology.                                                                                                                                                                                                    The essence of Russell’s text is that each human is an eternal consciousness that both experiences and is the manifestation of a single, eternal God-Mind. A human being is a conscious mind that experiences separate physical forms via waves and pulses of light which create the electrical charges governing her body and thoughts. As Russell puts it, “Electricity expresses the desire in the God-Mind for creative expression by seemingly dividing the One still ligh
Read more