The Long Journey Home: A Modern Western Double Feature
Savage State is currently available to watch at FACETS Virtual Cinema until January 21. For a captivating double feature, we suggest Meek’s Cutoff, Kelly Reichardt’s 2010 Western with a star studded cast who give career defining performances.
Savage State
Directed by David Perrault
French director David Perrault’s sophomore feature takes place in 1863, St. Louis, Missouri and follows a French family, attempting to abide by Napoleon’s strict rule of neutrality in the American Civil War. When American soldiers occupy the city and new laws disrupt the family’s ability to remain impartial, they make the difficult decision to return to France.
Eschewing conventional Civil War narratives that often focus on historic battles and those fighting them like Edward Zwick’s Glory (1989), Perrault instead tells a revisionist story of characters seeking to avoid becoming collateral damage in a battle that is not theirs to fight.
Savage State stands out from its contemporaries not only in its chosen subject matter, but with stunning visuals by cinematographer Christophe Duchange. “Seasons visibly pass onscreen, giving the story a lush sensibility as backdrops traverse summery skies to autumnal canopies to feverishly bright snow” (Mediadiversity Reviews).
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Meek’s Cutoff
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Deemed “more an experience than a story” by Roger Ebert, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) follows a group of settlers in 1845 who wander off the Oregon Trail and face dire consequences.
This critical favorite and Golden Lion nominee manages to be a nail-biting Western with plenty of general appeal, but at its core Meek’s Cutoff is still a Kelly Reichardt film, with complex characters stranded in an austerely-photographed wilderness.
Similar to Savage State, Reichardt is fascinated with how the harrowing elements of an on-foot journey affect the personal relationships of her characters. While the time period of the films differ by about 20 years, the vastness of the early American landscape reflects the uncertainty the characters feel.
As political polarization has risen over the past five years, creating a simmering modern-day civil war just below the surface, films like these can give insight into how history has been cinematically interpreted, for better and for worse. Both films aim to speak to the political tensions of their time by highlighting a a small group’s experiences.
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You can watch Savage State until January 21 through FACETS Virtual Cinema here.
Emma Greenleaf is the Marketing Coordinator at FACETS and has been spending the fall binge-watching the films of David Cronenberg. She has an MA in Media and Cinema Studies from DePaul University and has worked in almost every facet of the organization after starting as an intern in 2018.