Western does not wait for changes – Weekend – Kommersant
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A new film by Walter Hill has been released. With the help of several excellent actors, the classic filmed an exemplary western of the fifties, in which the characters of Christoph Waltz and Willem Dafoe cannot kill each other, and the girl turns out to be the main one in the end.
1897 Lumiere cinema has already been invented in France, medicine is making its most important discoveries, the 20th century is around the corner, but the savagery familiar from Westerns reigns in the American West. Bounty hunter Max Borlund (Christoph Waltz) routinely takes on another order – to find and return to the house the wife of Mr. Kidd, a prosperous businessman and aspiring politician from New Mexico. According to him, Rachel (Rachel Brosnahan) was kidnapped by black deserter Elijah Jones. Mr. Borlund must be helped by a friend of the attacker – Sergeant Alonso Po, who believes that everything is not so simple. At the very least, he manages to convince Borlund that the “kidnapping” most likely became Mrs. Kidd’s salvation from her unfit husband. In search of fugitives, a strange couple of mercenaries arrive in Mexico. There, in Chihuahua, everything is run by money, an evil and hard-hearted bandit named Tiberio Vargas, who works for Borlund’s old acquaintance, sworn enemy Cribbens (Willem Dafoe).
Perhaps the venerable classic Walter Hill, the same age as the main authors of New Hollywood, bears little resemblance to his colleagues Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola or Brian De Palma. If for the latter the traditional genre cinema was the object of complex reflections, transformations and deconstructions, fetters that had to be, if not crushed, then at least reforged for themselves, then for Hill the genre has always been a reliable refuge in which one could hide from the hardships of authorial crises. The screenwriter who conceived Alien and wrote for Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, he loved and knew how to make films by the rules, achieving incredible success within existing viewing conventions. On his account, action films, comedies, musical films and, of course, westerns, which today can be called classics without discounts. “All movies are westerns in some way,” Hill liked to say during the most productive years of his career. He was engaged in westerns throughout his life: back in 1980, his “Jumping from afar” came out, in the mid-1990s, following Sergio Leone, he re-shot Kurosawa’s “Bodyguard”, and it turned out “Lone Hero” with Bruce Willis, and then applied hand to the series “Deadwood”. And between them were films that were controlled by the elementary mechanics of the western.
Dying for a Dollar is a classic Western from start to finish. From the title, which reminds the viewer of Sergio Leone’s dollar trilogy somewhat insanely, to heroes, mercenaries and bandits, and the scene of action – the exaggerated wastelands of the Mexican border. Having exchanged the ninth decade, Hill demonstrates that he has not forgotten how to stay in the saddle and reload the Colt. Dying for a Dollar is a simple spectacle, yet respectful of genre tropes, as if purposely made on a very modest budget, which makes what is happening on the screen strongly reminiscent of a streaming cowboy production of the 1950s. Reference to this era is also indicated by the fact that the film is dedicated to Budd Boetticher, a classic of the cowboy genre, who today is known only as the screenwriter of “Two Mules for Sister Sarah.” Hill’s new work is not a majestic epic (the film is spared the pathos of the last look with which an aging classic casts an inhuman era), not an attempt to revive or embalm a genre that has died several times, but rather just another work that the author, like his hero Max Borlund used to doing well.
Hill doesn’t want to win or cancel anyone, and his austere directorial presence clears space for the actors. Not only for Waltz and Defoe. There are a lot of characters in Dying for a Dollar, but there’s a scene for everyone to show what you’re capable of. There are probably fewer gunfights here than ethical conflicts, but the dialogues are masterfully written, and calling this economical western boring just because the characters are in no hurry to settle scores with each other will not turn out the language. Somewhat strange for a viewer accustomed to excessive visual pressure of modern cinema may seem old-fashioned (if not archaic) camera work by Lloyd Ahern, but he, along with Walter Hill, obviously focused on the old masters, on those who made westerns seventy years ago. Well, it’s hard to blame the authors for the fact that John Ford and Howard Hawks are dearer to them than the latest trendsetters (even the classic spaghetti western against the backdrop of “To Die for a Dollar” seems like an aggressive remake). However, it is this ostentatious “old mode” of the picture that focuses attention on the central conflict of the film – the old days go into oblivion along with people like Borlund and Cribbens, and the main character in this male film in the end is the heroine Rachel Brosnahan, a girl in trouble who decided to take fate into your own hands.
In theaters from 13 October
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