My favorite film at this year’s festival was a late-night screening of an unhurried western with three acts and an epilogue. Biliana and Marina Grozdanova’s Eastern Western is a flat-out masterpiece. Too often (and wearily so), the western concerns itself with frontier justice and law and order melee. The Grozdanova’s film is refreshing for the way it juggles expectation and becomes a gentle treatise on the fraternity that grows out of the immigrant experience in nineteenth century America. With the exception of one marvelously executed shootout, the film chooses to focus on campfire conversations, everyday life, and the hard necessity of friendship in an unknown territory.
Opening on immigrant Igor (Igor Galijasevic) and his young son as they fend for themselves in a wintery cabin, Eastern Western immediately enraptured me in the way it observes and harnesses the simple goodness of survival. There are interactions with brown bears. The act of keeping a crying two-year-old satisfied with the loss of his mother. And an icy landscape that sends shivers down the spine.
It’s here that friend Duncan (Duncan Vezain) arrives and invites Igor to help him on his horse ranch. It’s an offer Igor initially declines, but necessity soon prompts Igor to settle with Duncan and his family (also played by his real-life wife and two fair haired daughters). The second act of the film introduces more people during life on the ranch, and even though small moments of darkness encroach on the beautifully languid atmosphere, Eastern Western continues to spin an air of naturalism that’s hard to deny.
The third act and epilogue pack the most power as the film extends its worldview across generations and even oceans. I won’t spoil the fantastic epilogue, but Eastern Western is a film that more easily comments on the fragments of life’s endless circle than other efforts that spend 3 hours and CGI to bind people and worlds together. Just a wonderful film.
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Crafted from a well-meaning place, Andrew Stevens’ Stella Stevens The Last Starlet gives the actress the full blown retrospective treat. Culling from a wealth of film clips, home photographs, and star-struck interviewees, the film charts Stella’s arc from bombshell beauty to hard working technician for over 4 decades in Hollywood. Unfortunately, the material is good, but the documentary never quite rises above television documentary standards.
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Picked up for distribution by Dallas based Well Go Entertainment and eyeing a release date this summer, Evan Ari Kelman’s thriller Barron’s Cove wants to reach for some of the same twisted moral tension of the films of James Gray or Sidney Lumet. Sadly, it never reaches anything close to those, and ends being an overheated affair that lost interest for me pretty early on despite my usual fervor for this type of material.
When a father (Garret Hedlund) faces a traumatic experience, his recourse is to make things worse, eventually incurring the wrath of a local politician (Hamish Linklater) and the father-like man he works for (Stephen Lang).
Barron’s Cove has all the elements to make it a compelling effort, but the script is a bit too heavy handed and there’s no real shades of complexity in any of the characters.
Dallas Film Now. 