Every so often the motion picture photography will just stop and a moment - usually a moment of violence - will be represented by a painting, in glowing colours. It's a powerful and dense device. The paintings are more shocking than explicit gore, which simply encourages us to turn away in disgust and then forget about it ... the paintings work, in fact, as Brechtian "distancing" devices ought to (but usually don't) work, distancing us from the concerns of the moment without distancing us from the world of the fiction. (They also hint at an aboriginal perspective. They suggest that the events we see are, somewhere and at some time, being documented; that even if they won't ever become part of any white historian's account, they will still enter into the historical record in some form.)
Alas, de Heer violates the one-gimmick rule by also using a narrative song track. The low point is when we see the four main characters plodding along on horseback, the camera holding each in turn in a tight close-up, and the singer, who sounds as though he could not be brisk or succinct if his life depended on it, tells us about each of them, one interminable song stanza per character - and he tells us stuff we already know anyway. In fact, the singer NEVER tells us anything we don't already know or aren't capable of working out. I swear, if a troubador had strolled in front of the camera, strumming a lute, it could not have been more intrusive (and might have been more entertaining). To be fair, the songs take up very little time overall. For one or two long stretches they're absent altogether. They do most of their damage by making us worry that they'll come back.
Minus the songs it's a wonderful film. It's a wonderful film anyway. De Heer has a tight, perfectly formed story that's nonetheless entirely believable, about the uncertain, shifting balance of power between the three riders and between the riders and the tracker; it's strongly acted and told with visual mastery (there's a memorable scene in which we see - with just a few simple shots - a dry plain from the perspective of the follower, full of identical white pebbles, and from the perspective of the tracker, with a single pebble that must have been displaced in the past hour or so leaping to the eye). The songs I soon forgot; the film itself I won't.
Alas, de Heer violates the one-gimmick rule by also using a narrative song track. The low point is when we see the four main characters plodding along on horseback, the camera holding each in turn in a tight close-up, and the singer, who sounds as though he could not be brisk or succinct if his life depended on it, tells us about each of them, one interminable song stanza per character - and he tells us stuff we already know anyway. In fact, the singer NEVER tells us anything we don't already know or aren't capable of working out. I swear, if a troubador had strolled in front of the camera, strumming a lute, it could not have been more intrusive (and might have been more entertaining). To be fair, the songs take up very little time overall. For one or two long stretches they're absent altogether. They do most of their damage by making us worry that they'll come back.
Minus the songs it's a wonderful film. It's a wonderful film anyway. De Heer has a tight, perfectly formed story that's nonetheless entirely believable, about the uncertain, shifting balance of power between the three riders and between the riders and the tracker; it's strongly acted and told with visual mastery (there's a memorable scene in which we see - with just a few simple shots - a dry plain from the perspective of the follower, full of identical white pebbles, and from the perspective of the tracker, with a single pebble that must have been displaced in the past hour or so leaping to the eye). The songs I soon forgot; the film itself I won't.