Western

Many ideas and themes can be found in this “story" about how a group of German workers try to establish relations with the Bulgarian inhabitants of the village near which they work. However, there is no plot and the film is more of a sequence of scenes about how people are able to understand each other without knowing each other’s languages, or how to get on each other’s nerves. The slow-moving character study of many characters against the backdrop of the Bulgarian countryside is intelligently directed and successfully cast with natural non-actors, but at the same time perfectly unobtrusive, undramatic, unengaging and telling you nothing specific that will stick in your mind. (03.07.2017)

The social drama Western is indeed aptly titled. The state of unsettling tension between a group of German workers working somewhere in a remote part of Bulgaria and the local villagers has the poetry of Western films. Especially when horses are quite often present in the shots and in the plot itself. Meinhard Neumann gives the impression that he was born for the title role. His charisma combined with his civilian acting gives the character the necessary depth and a certain amount of mystery. This film is certainly not just a mindless spectacle, but it highlights the serious problems that can arise when two different cultures clash. Here it is conceived from a purely European point of view as a conflict between the Eastern mentality and the Western material way of life. The main character gets caught up in the midst of both worlds, brilliantly demonstrating the desire to belong somewhere while simultaneously struggling to fit in. My only reservation would be the occasional dead spots in the story. (70%) (01.05.2020)

Western is a pleasant film about ordinary people and the clash of their respective cultures. In their German-Bulgarian bilingual dialogues, they understand about one word out of ten, yet they will completely win you over with their guilelessness, humanity and feelings that are so familiar to all of us but for which there is usually no room in films. Unbelievable things can be done with non-actors if you have a clear directorial intent and a high emotional quotient. The worker in the leading role was the most charismatic character out of all of those I saw at Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this year. (06.07.2017)

Nice work with plot motifs, narrative formulas and the iconography of the western, whose romanticism clashes with the unsentimentally depicted social reality of contemporary Europe, where borders that had been erased are being redrawn. Instead of cowboys conquering Indian country, a group of German workers colonise a Bulgarian village (flying the flag, saddling up on someone else’s horse, getting close to a local woman). The theme comprising the clash of two cultures is crucial, except it is more of a clash between East and West than between civilisation and wilderness. The members of the two sub-worlds between which the protagonist moves actually understand each other less than they outwardly appear to. An ambiguous loner for whom freedom is evidently more important than family. Despite that, however, he clearly wants to belong somewhere, to be accepted by others (but it’s hard to say what exactly he desires, as concealing his emotions is part of his nature). For my taste, however, there were too many mood-evoking shots of the wandering protagonist holding a cigarette, the frequency of which probably has something to do with the looser structure of the story, which gives the impression of having been created “on the fly”. In terms of style and narrative structure, the film reminded me quite a lot of a long line of other festival dramas (the veristic shooting style, the final violent clash followed by catharsis), and the theme of western companies (and the possessive mentality) expanding into the “developing” countries of Eastern Europe was more aptly addressed in Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann. 75% (02.11.2017)

A perfectly accurate character study and an ironic play on the genre. It is film about the inability to accept loneliness and the eternal desire to belong, even at the cost of denying oneself. Beautiful poetry of understanding without words. (27.05.2017)