#517: Savage State
An excruciatingly slow burn casts long shadows despite a few missteps
Initial release: October 5, 2019
Director: David Perrault
Savage State is a movie about women. Its protagonists are women; its central antagonist is a woman. The men — from the drunken soldier who murders an elderly party-goer to the wealthy family patriarch with an unspoken but plainly obvious relationship with his black servant (who, he insistently explains, is an employee, emancipated and paid a wage, for unlike his neighbors he’s not a barbarian) to the grizzled mercenary wandering in from a different movie who serves as the lead’s brief, but ultimately empty, romantic connection — the men largely exist in relation to the women; they wouldn’t be here otherwise. And perhaps that’s a little unusual for a western. After all, what’s more a symbol of American masculinity than that most American and manly of film genre? So perhaps it’d surprise you to learn that much of the film (though not all of it) is in French, to boot.
A brief introductory text explains the situation: as America devolves into a shooting war over whether it’s okay to own human beings, the French Empire is warning its constituents abroad to remain neutral. Esther is an upper-class French settler living in Missouri with her family and their maid, Layla. By December 1863, the United States Army has occupied the region, with the infamous General Order No. 28 — decreeing that women who aren’t nice enough to the occupying troops are to be treated as whores — causing much consternation. When a drunken soldier makes a scene at a party after being rejected by Esther, eventually shooting off several rounds and killing an elderly woman, Esther’s father decides to pick up stakes and move the whole family back to Paris. To facilitate this he hires Victor, a mercenary who’s done some work for him in the past (and who is introduced partaking in a smuggling deal that goes bad) to lead the family, Layla, and two porters cross-country to New York, from where they can get a boat back to France. Unfortunately, Bettie, a wild-eyed blonde gunslinger with some apparent history with Victor, is hell-bent on revenge for the massacre Victor perpetrated, especially when she susses out Esther’s apparent attraction to him.
Of course, the idea of a (de facto) feminist French western isn’t that weird — 1954’s Johnny Guitar centered Joan Crawford in a morass of thinly-veiled bisexuality and open loathing, and while Italy has the monopoly on foreign films about an American era, France has made its own contributions in the past with films like Cemetery Without Crosses and Red Sun. (Those latter two, admittedly, are co-productions with Italy.) But I don’t know that there’s ever been a film quite like Savage State; when the novelty of it wears off what we’re left with is a haunting Southern gothic about gender and class.
Esther carries the film; by far the most competent and driven of the family, it’s she who ends up taking the reins in the film’s finale. She’s unwilling to back down even when Victor demands to know what she has to prove. Her relationship with Victor is silly and extraneous and unconvincing, and I suspect the only one to whom that wasn’t obvious was Victor himself.
It’s not a perfect film by any means; David Perrault could have stood to trim a few minutes off what feels longer than the allotted two hours, with glacial pacing that takes a good forty minutes before the family even decides to leave town. The subplot with Layla’s practicing of voodoo feels tacky, especially given that she’s practically the only person of color who appears on screen (the black waiters at the party are barely more than background props.) That it seemingly inserts a strongly implied supernatural bent to the film’s final scene does not help. Esther’s sisters don’t have much characterization, with the middle sister Abi’s illness mostly serving as an excuse to hold the family up at the abandoned farmhouse for the finale, and the older sister Justine gets a scene to fill out her character a bit that just doesn’t land, not because she confesses to fooling around with a girl, but that it happens to be with a cousin. (It also really reframes her close relationship with Abi in a way that I’m not sure the filmmakers intended.)
Still, though, this is a dark dream of feminist kino with superb cinematography, a hallucinatory ride through a journey that is as much personal as it is physical, like what Justine says of Esther, it’s a journey with no clear path — and that’s not always a bad thing.
