Slow West.

Its 1870 and 16 year old Jay Cavendish travels from a privileged life in Scotland to America in search of the love of his life. Rose Ross and her father had to leave their croft in Scotland following an altercation with 16 year olds father, Lord Cavendish, John Ross knocks the man to the floor where he bangs his head on a rock and bleeds out. Completely unprepared for the journey across the prairie its not long before the naive young boy needs rescuing. Knowing more than he lets on Silas Selleck offers, for a price, to assist Jay in his search for Ross and her father. But Silas and Jay are not the only ones looking for the father and daughter.  A ruthless gang of bounty hunters led by Payne are also on their trail.

 

The naive Jay Cavendish.

This exceptional debut feature film has been directed and written by John Maclean who some may remember from his involvement with the Scottish band The Beta Band and a couple of short films he made with Michael Fassbender who also stars in this movie as the cheroot chewing Silas Selleck a man of mixed emotions. Kodi Smit-McPhee, a budding young actor who can be seen in various films that have included the Hammer remake Let Me In (2010) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014), plays Jay Cavendish. We also get another wonderful lesson in ‘menacing’ by the brilliant Ben Mendelsohn as Payne.

 

Silas Selleck, a man who knows more than he admits.

The menacing Payne. 

Starkly beautiful, Slow West (2015) is a brutal film that involves a misdirected love affair that unfortunately leads many to their deaths. To John Maclean’s great credit this promising young filmmaker gives us a movie that percolates realism displaying what the people and the landscape would have been like in 1870’s Colorado. In my opinion it’s a film that demonstrates humanities greed where people are sacrificed, one way or another for personnel gain – some things don’t change. Certainly a western with a difference, unglamorous maybe, but one not to be missed. 

         

Tracker

Arjan van Dieman (Ray Winstone)

It’s strange how certain films trigger something in your own memory and the RBC offering on Friday night did just that. The United Kingdom/New Zealand joint production Tracker (2010) reminded me of the adventure stories that were published in the now long defunct Boys Own Paper a monthly magazine I read in the late 1950’s, it was a publication that shamelessly targeted boys in the days before the term ‘teenager’ was made fashionable!

Set in New Zealand shortly after the end of the Second Boer war, which was fought from 1899 until 1902 between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics in South Africa. Arjan van Dieman, an Afrikaans veteran, arrives to start a new life after he was forced to abandon his home after his farm was burnt to the ground and his lands ruined. With nothing but what he stands up in he is forced to except employment from the British army when they offer him a generous bounty to track a Maori sailor accused of killing a British soldier in a fight that he did not start. During the many escapes and recaptures a sense of respect grows between the Boer tracker and Kerema the Maori who both realise they have a lot more in common than they originally thought: the mutual hatred of the British colonialists.

Kerema. (Temuera Morrison)

The superb pairing of Ray Winstone as Dieman and New Zealand actor Temuera Morrison as Kerema, who came to prominence as Jake “the Muss” Heke in the 1994 movie Once Were Warriors, are a pleasure to watch with Winstone achieving a very convincing Afrikaans accent. Shot around the beautiful Queenstown Lakes area in the southwest of New Zealand’s South Island and directed by Ian Sharp with a script from the late Nicholas van Pallandt. This is a very enjoyable piece of filmmaking, a good old-fashioned escapist distraction from a rather wet Friday evening.