“
Growing up in Montana, I got to see the worst and the best of the American West.
James Stewart rightly said that the western is the purest form of cinema.
It is the story of a landscape that crushes its characters.
The larger
the expanse, the more powerful is nature, the more cornered are the men who wander there.
How can you resist the appeal of a genre that
evokes our childhood games, cowboys against Indians, and whose blind spots, not yet explored, are so numerous
?
“,
professes Hugo Blick.
The English screenwriter of contemporary and painful stories such as
Black Earth Rising
(about the Rwandan genocide) and
The Honorable Woman
(about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict) surprises with his mystical and wild ride
, The English
.
A more convincing series, anchored in reality and anti-conformist than the re-reading of
Django
on the same antenna of Canal+.
Read alsoDjango, The English... The western, the new Eldorado of series
Hugo Blick brings to the fore the great marginals of the western: women and Indians.
Daughter of a peer from the United Kingdom, Lady Cornelia Locke (Emily Blunt, the heroine of
Mary Poppins
and
Quiet
) arrives in the hostile Kansas of 1890, satchels of dollars in hand.
Angry mother tracks down the man responsible for her son's death.
The haughty aristocrat, who is stopping in a rudimentary hotel, is picked up on his descent from the stagecoach by a scene that revolts her: an Indian is tied up and suspended upside down.
The crime of Eli, aka Wounded Wolf?
His skin color and his desire to claim the piece of land promised by the American army to this former Pawnee scout during the Civil War.
To survive, Cornelia and Eli (Chaske Spencer, Cherokee actor discovered in
Twilight
) join forces.
He will escort her to Wyoming.
brutal playground
“
In the DNA of the western, revenge is central.
I wanted to slip in something more epic and intimate.
Leave it to Cornelia and Eli to find and claim their identities.
The western exalts the myth of the pioneer by forgetting the original populations that the Europeans exterminated
”
, points out Hugo Blick.
“
My character seeks blood money
;
Eli asserts his right to his ancestral land.
In the other, everyone will find what they lack.
A form of tenderness, admiration and healing that it would be very simplistic to call romance
.
, warns Emily Blunt.
Cornelia shoots rifle and bow just as well as Eli.
The West frees her from the shackles linked to her rank.
Keen on astrology, she takes refuge in Eli's beliefs to make sense of the tragedies that led her to cross the Atlantic.
His native protector must reconcile his involvement in the Union cavalry with the destruction of his people and his way of life.
Shot in Spain, this journey, interspersed with memorable encounters (including the farmer's wife portrayed by Valérie Parchner, from A
Hidden Life
), finds in Andalusia irradiated with a low sun a brutal playground. The actors endured long hours on horseback.
"
Their fatigue was not feigned
",
emphasizes Hugo Blick, amazed to work with the descendants of the technicians who worked on the sets of Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, the maestros of the spaghetti western.
This filiation, like that with Quentin Tarantino, permeates the film.
If he baptizes his odyssey
The English
, it is because Blick intends to show the central and little-known role of the nobles of perfidious Albion in the breeding of cattle within the Great Plains.
English cinema was also a pioneer.
It was he who offered the seventh art his first western, excerpts from which conclude this series.