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Emily Blunt in »The English«: Those who live have the last word
Photo: Diego Lopez Calvin/BBC/Amazon/Magenta TV
A wooden shack in the steppe that calls itself a hotel.
A woman and a man at an unexpectedly elegant table set with two helpings of Prairie Oysters — raw bull testicles, the only high-protein snack for those who crave oysters in the barren nowhere of Kansas.
The man, owner of the prairie inn, voluptuously chews on his testicles.
The woman asks, "You want to rape me?" The man replies, "I'm realistic about issues of consent." The woman suggests, "Then fuck a horse!"
The dialogues in this western are often more menacingly pointed than any gun duel;
whoever survives has the last word.
In this case it is the woman.
Because before the man has eaten his bull testicles and can commit the planned rape, he has a knife in his back, apparently out of nowhere.
It was thrown by the Pawnee, whom the hotel owner had previously tortured on the forecourt of his wooden shack and who had been freed by the woman.
So throwing a knife was just paying a debt.
No need to get emotional.
The Pawnee, called Wounded Wolf (Chaske Spencer), and the woman, Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt), ride together for a while, then they part ways.
Actually.
He, who worked as a scout in the US Cavalry, wants his tribe's land in Nebraska back.
She, who comes from a noble family in England, wants to find and kill the murderer of her child in Wyoming.
The year is 1890. The Midwest is vast and still largely deserted.
But the area is filling up, more and more people coming from the east are looking for a parcel of land that has not yet been marked out, and where people meet, they usually kill each other.
Scalps instead of family pictures on the wall
On the way, the Pawnee and the Lady come across a German wagon that has been ambushed by bandits.
All the adults are dead, but inside the corpse of a heavily pregnant woman lives the unborn child that Wounded Wolf is about to bring into the world.
Later, he and his companion free a Cheyenne boy from captivity in the yard of an indigenous hater, on whose living room wall the scalps of her victims are draped like family pictures.
But before that, the scalp hunter and her two sadistic sons were shot and stabbed.
The long ride of the Englishwoman and the Pawnee, it is the only coming and going, life in its most precious form.
The six-part western series »The English« by Hugo Blick begins in Kansas with a gory overture that looks as if Quentin Tarantino had recreated a spaghetti western by Sergio Corbucci.
Sawing guitars, blatant close-ups, lustfully delayed explosions of violence.
But Blick's epic is not an ironically playful revenge movie in the style of »Django Unchained«, not an artistically overwrought outlaw cracker that counterfactually unrolls the historical western in order to create greater justice for the characters who have been neglected in the genre (and in general).
Director Blick unpacks the whole Western toolbox to reinvent the genre.
There are so many quotes from the old masters here, from John Ford to John Huston to John Sturges, that it's impossible to keep up with the list.
Greetings from »The Searchers«
After entering Corbucci-Tarantino, you see rolling covered wagons and squat wooden huts nailed into the prairie dunes, as you know them from Ford's settler epics ("The Searchers").
Filming takes place out of the comfortably wobbling carriages into the dangerous expanses or out of the cozy hut onto the corn fields that have just been sown.
The next massacre is always on the doorstep of the
home, sweet home
, which is not yet completely finished.
But the Briton Blick, who most recently dealt with the genocide in Rwanda and the involvement of former European colonial powers in it in the series "Black Earth Rising", now tells of a land grab under the opposite sign: Here the indigenous people set out to recapture their stolen territory.
The title »The English« refers on the one hand to the English lady that the Pawnee meets in Kansas, as well as to all non-indigenous characters who practice their bloody craft in the vastness of the prairie.
Just as the representatives of various indigenous peoples, whether Apaches, Sioux or Pawnees, were all "Indians" for the first settlers, so the whites, whether Russians, Germans or Englishmen, are all "The English" for Wounded Wolf - one continuous growing horde descending on their land from every nook and cranny of the world to drench it in blood.
Phenomenal how series creator Blick rewrites the perspectives and fighting techniques of old frontier epics - for example when white bandits (and bandits, of course!) look down from cliffs like the indigenous staff of earlier »Native American westerns« or when the English lady and not the Pawnee shoots with the bow , because that was the kind of sport that English ladies practiced at the time before tea.
»The English« - produced by the BBC and now on Magenta TV - is a post-colonial western that, for all its political correctness, never turns its characters into dummies.
No noble savage, the Pawnee is a torn character who has inherited guilt while surviving between the reservation and the cavalry.
A classic broken Western hero who struggles in loneliness to come to terms with his failings, but is forced to renegotiate his life when someone else invades his loner life.
The series also functions as a psychologically precise western melodrama, which reflects the inner life of its two main characters in a landscape setting that is as threatening as it is intoxicating.
Much of the plot is improbable, nothing is implausible.
That an abused woman and an outlawed indigenous man find each other in the midst of a series of massacres only survived with difficulty under a sparkling wide-screen starry sky seems like the most natural thing in the world in this series.
»The English«
runs on Magenta TV