2024-07-04 04:53:30
Viggo Mortensen is used to long journeys since his most famous role as the ranger Aragorn in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. After the fifty-six-year-old actor and versatile artist received the Crystal Globe for his contribution to world cinema at the opening of the festival in Karlovy Vary on Friday, he presented his second original film here.
He wrote and directed the western romance called Until the End of the World, he acts in it himself and also composed the music for the film. There is also no shortage of slow, long journeys on horseback. Czech cinemas will start screening the new film next Thursday, July 4.
Danish immigrant Holger Olsen looks like a typical ferocious hero from stories about the settlement of the Wild West. He moves in an environment of rowdy overgrown cowboys, in a town where the son of a local influential rich man does not hesitate to beat a pianist almost to death when he plays his unpopular song.
But Holger is not such a neophyte after all. At the very beginning, he buries his sweetheart, while a silent boy, who can’t even read and write yet, helps him cover his mother’s grave with dirt. This doesn’t seem like the ideal start to a romance. To surprise the viewer even more, in the very first shot shot from below, most likely through a child’s lens, a knight rides through the forest on a horse. It no longer fits at all in the middle of the 19th century, when the story takes place.
The confident Vivienne, who is not going to be intimidated by the local arrogant men, is probably looking at that knight in her dreams, imaginations or perhaps memories. The great actress Vicky Krieps, known from the movie Corset, doesn’t have to do anything more than wink or move two muscles in her face to characterize Vivienne as a fearless but at the same time funny protagonist who can be the “master” of the situation whenever necessary.
Viggo Mortensen takes his time and carefully draws the audience into a mournful film that plays with the procedures and settings of classic Westerns, while revisionistly deconstructing traditional narratives of love, revenge and injustice.
Holger, played by Viggo Mortensen, looks like a typical hero from stories about the settlement of the Wild West. | Photo: Aerofilms
The film Until the end of the world jumps between several time frames, we get one of the main tragedies right from the beginning, but what preceded it and what will follow, we learn only gradually.
The romantic drama benefits from one fact: we know in advance that several residents of the growing Nevada town of Elk Flats will die during the course of the story. It hurts the most in the case of Vivienne gradually getting closer to Holger, who is “just Olsen” to her.
The heroine does not need to know his full name in order to go somewhere outside the city with him – to live in an abandoned wooden shed, which with a little imagination can be called a home. And the surrounding wasteland, with a little effort, can eventually become a garden.
Jumps in time and completion of the narrative puzzle lead to more complicated work with emotions, the viewer can hardly experience with the characters their slowly awakening feelings when they know that everything will end soon. At the same time, however, Mortensen builds this relationship not on the basis of some melodramatic exuberance of emotions. It resembles friendship or partnership rather than passionate love.
The key is understanding, often wordless. At the same time, the non-linear narrative sometimes evokes a cruel irony.
Viggo Mortensen has created one of the slowest contemporary revisionist Westerns, probably too slow. Each shot takes a third longer than it should, which can sometimes lead to contemplative, meditative works. But Until the End of the World is not that aesthetically self-confident and sharp title, rather, it sometimes breathes too much effort – to extract the photogenic charm of the surrounding landscape, to let Mortensen’s face play when the hero makes his way through the trees.
At the same time, the director does not introduce the two protagonists to us enough for us to be fully with them when certain turning points in their lives take place. For example, when Olsen suddenly feels the urgent need to go fight in the civil war and leaves the woman with whom he has barely started living together indefinitely in a house in the middle of the wasteland, whose bleakness is beautified only by a few roses in a miniature garden.
Their taciturn partnership, bolstered by nuanced performances, has enough charm on its own in many scenes, but not enough to illuminate all of the characters’ motivations. On the other hand, some dramaturgical decisions reek of being too literal.
Until the End of the World is a film that remarkably mixes fierce characters and tenderness, giving space to other heroes than is usual in the genre. But it still gives off a rather sloppy concept, preconceived but never fully animated.
This traipsing through a semi-civilized world is probably more tiresome than the author intended. Pictured are Viggo Mortensen as Holger and Vicky Krieps as Vivienne. | Photo: Aerofilms
The creators are able to move familiar motifs from western and samurai works – such as a lone man wandering the countryside with a small boy – into new contexts. They touch on the ever-current topic of sexual violence and how the victim and those around him deal with it – again silently, unobtrusively, all the more remarkable. Even so, this thrashing through a semi-civilized world is more tiring than the author probably intended.
However, as the very first day of the Karlovy Vary festival showed, cowgirls can be broken even in a much more playful and radical way. The authors of another film called Lolo and Sosaku in the Wild West are sound artists, and this couple in hats does not so much inhabit the western-looking landscape as they bombard and penetrate with their bizarre ideas.
In one of the opening shots of the film, which can be seen three more times at the festival, a strange mechanical metal toy rolls across the sandy ground. It resembles a frightened mare crossed with a miniature jackhammer.
In another scene, one of the protagonists hunts a relative of that robotic grasshopper, so that the heroes can then roast this structure overgrown with wires on fire.
The hour-long, slightly surreal play by the Spanish artist Sergio Caballero freely shows the thinking of sound artists who let their audio installations create something on the border between music, sound and noise with the help of mechanized instruments or deconstructed pianos that play on themselves.
In carefully thought-out compositions, the surrounding landscape explodes, at other times one hero drives another on a special vehicle over an endlessly long line of motionless bugs. Along the way, they boldly break the line between creation and destruction. And the festival viewer knows again: Karlovy Vary has begun.
During the first day, we smashed the building blocks of the Western genre to dust. Once again, a ten-day pilgrimage through the labyrinth of unexpected cinematographic contexts awaits us.
Film
Until the end of the world
Screenplay and direction: Viggo Mortensen
Aerofilms, Czech premiere on July 4.