WESTERN: The Man With No Home

Western, the third feature from director Valeska Grisebach (and the first in a decade), follows Meinhard — played incredibly by first-timer Meinhard Neumann — a German who has come to bucolic Bulgaria with his fellow construction workers. They’re working on installing an electrical power system near the land’s water, but have to deal with the locals’ hostility towards them and the language barrier between the two groups. Meinhard does what he can to reconcile these differences.

Grisebach follows her protagonist like the Dardennes follow theirs: he’s in or around every shot, often followed with handheld over-the-shoulder shots or in medium-framed observations of small conversations. I can understand Grisebach’s attachment to Meinhard; his tired face imparts an almost immediate kinship, cultivated through a persistent vulnerability. He’s uncertain, unable to figure out every situation. But he’s trying, and he’s perceptive enough to know when someone is handling a situation poorly (even if he sits idly by).

We like to use the term coming of age to label films about young people growing into adulthood, refracted through major life events that shape who they will continue to be. Western reminds me that figuring out who we are is a continual process.

The Western

The film doesn’t have an obvious allusion to the gun-slinging genre of its title; there are no duels or outlaws. But it does play on the genre’s taciturn hero. Grisebach replaces the mysterious, self-assured cowboy with a man who’s completely lost, unsure of his own identity. At one point, he tells a Bulgarian woman, “There’s nothing keeping me home.” A more on-the-nose title may have been The Man With No Home.

“I grew up with westerns and the heroes of the genre, although looking back I realize that watching those films as a child — and a girl in particular — is different,” Grisebach told Cinema Scope. “You tend to identify with the male heroes rather than the women, because they’re simply more appealing. It’s the men who stare adventure or certain missions in the eye or settle rights or conflicts. So, as a woman or as a girl, I was also being slightly excluded from the genre at the same time.” This distinct perspective, as a fan of something that has sidelined people like herself, has clearly informed her approach to Western.

In speaking with Little White Lies about her research, Grisebach makes it known that she was intent on playing with genre from step one: “In the beginning, I wanted to talk to people, mainly men, about their ‘western’ moments in life. I went onto the street and was looking for men that I could imagine on a horse in a western. Very soon, I ended up moving towards construction workers. They have tools on their belt, and they wear work clothes and have this certain surly attitude.”

Confronting Colonialism

Grisebach’s film ties this masculine tableau to the genre’s history with colonialism, most epitomized in the Cowboys and Indians subset — often a distillation of white hegemony. She’s confronting that colonialism, placing foreign men (of a wealthy country with an ugly past) in the countryside of a smaller one, armed with a plan to improve their land.

“The pristine Bulgarian countryside is tinged with melancholy as the workers start altering the course of the river, just as the virgin soil of classic westerns appears full of broken promises today since modernisation eventually killed off the cowboy way and the American Dream seems like nothing more than that – a dream,” said Manuela Lazic in her review for Little White Lies.

You get the sense that the Bulgarians’ immediate hostility is rooted in this historical knowledge, of both a larger spectrum of colonialism and Germany’s specific reputation (many reviewers have pointed out the similarities between Western and 2016’s Toni Erdmann, which not only share a pessimistic view of Germany’s modern industrialism but also a pedigree). When a local yells at the German foreman for temporarily shutting off their water supply, the foreman is confused, saying “We’re here to help them.” The group are oblivious interlopers, unaware of the inherent implications and reverberations of their work there as foreigners.

 

There is a disregard or lack of responsibility that runs through Western. Grisebach posits both groups of men as unable to see past their own nose or consider the perspectives of others. This plays out in overwhelmingly sad ways, like when the foreman uses Meinhard’s beautiful white horse without regard for its limits. It also happens in small moments, like when a local youngster plays what seems like a harmless prank on Meinhard but ends up temporarily injured. The men’s deficient responsibility is coupled with an inability to communicate. Often, one exacerbating the other.

This behavior quickly grates on our audience surrogate. Meinhard tries to be the moderator between the two groups: ingratiating himself to the Bulgarians while keeping the social credit he has with his fellow construction workers. But it proves too taxing a pitch to strike. The frustration of reconciling the incessant territorialism that knocks between both parties mounts, drawing Meinhard inward rather than out, and the distinction that he’s a man of a different temperament dissolves. Earlier in the film, he tells a Bulgarian woman, “Either you eat or get eaten. The stronger one always wins. And we’re strong enough for this world.” I’m not so sure.

Conclusion: Western

The film’s pace is placid, choosing to bathe in its masculine marinade. “I wanted to have a narrative, but I also wanted to hide it,” Grisebach told Little White Lies. She succeeded. However, the film’s never dull as she casts an almost omnipresent terror over it, hauntingly juxtaposed against the beautiful backdrop of rural Bulgaria. It’s a terror made up of the percolating, unpredictable anger that articulates the fear of watching men — just the possibility of anger can be frightening.

The last film to strike such a tone was Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, which exists within a much different context. That was a film where men’s ability to strike physical abuse on the heroine constantly swarmed the film’s fringes, threatening to enter and become a part of the text. Grisebach has a similar ability, presumably found in the editing room, to make her viewer expect the next cut to escalate from tension to physical aggression, from joking around to hurting each other.

The last line of the film is from one of the Bulgarians that Meinhard has come to know fairly well. He approaches Meinhard, who’s been given a couple punches to the gut by a local, and says, “What are you looking for here?” One of the first things Meinhard told a man upon arriving in Bulgaria was, “I’m just here to make money.” By the end of the film, that sentiment feels quaint and false. Of course, the reason he doesn’t have an answer for the Bulgarian is because he doesn’t know why he’s anywhere. If he has no home, what’s the difference between being here and being anywhere else? The last image we have of Meinhard is of him wandering into a local party, slowly performing a dance to the music, trying to get comfortable. We get the sense that the tension between the locals and someone like Meinhard can never fully be resolved.

What are your thoughts on Western?

Western saw release on April 13th in the UK. Find international release dates here.