At the Edinburgh Filmhouse from Tue 15 May
This film follows a group of German builders working on a remote site in the Bulgarian countryside who are forced to confront their prejudices when they come into contact with the local villagers. The one exception to this is Meinhard (Meinhard Neumann), whose befriending of the locals also brings him into conflict with the other workers.
Director Grisebach doesn’t rely on heightened dramatics to sensationalise the clashes between the Germans and Bulgarians, instead favouring a slow-burn pacing that allows the relationship between the two groups to develop. This results in a more naturalistic depiction of their interactions, alternating between provocative incidents (such as the death of a Bulgarian horse) and Meinhard’s growing friendship with the villagers, which makes it less easy to predict the outcome of the situation. By doing this, the film subverts narratives seen in films such as Deliverance and Southern Comfort, where the more civilised outsiders are attacked by antagonistic, savage rural locals, thus presenting a more nuanced perspective on this clash of cultures.
Grisebach, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, also accurately depicts how the language barrier between the Germans and Bulgarians both affects their attempts to negotiate with each other but also results in Meinhard working to overcome it in order to communicate with the villagers. This latter aspect is also made effective by Neumann’s performance in his acting debut, who not only convinces in his relationship with the Bulgarians, but also manages to subtly convey Meinhard’s alienation from the other Germans as well as the character’s implied darker past, which is wisely underplayed by Grisebach – a more sensationalist film would have made this aspect more prominent at the expense of realism.
Whilst this commitment to naturalism results in the film becoming more than just a simplistic culture-clash narrative, the lack of a conclusion to the mounting antagonism between the two sides does come across as anti-climactic and more than a little frustrating, especially considering the high quality of the rest of the film. Despite this problem, Western is an overall effective depiction of the cultural tensions between the native and migrant populations in a Europe that is increasingly divided over issues of nationalism.