![]() Only the most robust remain, the ones that set off already determined never to turn back. The above-mentioned amputation serves as an image for what the little band of travellers has to suffer, losing little by little their equipment and their members. ![]() Pushed to their uttermost limits (one can hardly refrain from a painful grimace on hearing the sound of a gangrenous leg being sawn off with a knife), the only reason they have left for pushing on is the fact that they can no longer turn back. But once all the technical incidents both possible and imaginable have been overcome, they are confronted by the possibility of death itself. It is this dream that enables them to push onwards despite the misfortunes that befall them one by one on their perilous journey, changing the group dynamics. In this case, it is a group of Germans who each have their reasons for risking their savings and lives in the hope of finding gold (the most mysterious being Hoss with her slightly pinched lips, as if to keep her past a secret, her blue eyes gazing towards a horizon about which we can only speculate), and who think they are well prepared for what is to come. While trying out a new genre, Arslan nevertheless pursues his predilection for putting individuals together who have no real connections among themselves, are suspicious of each other and only cohabit by necessity and engage in a bare minimum of conversation. Arslan, who has already won an award in Berlin (for Dealer in 1999), but for whom this is the first movie to have been selected in competition, has here opted for a rather classic rendition of the familiar imagery of the western with its steam engines, immense landscapes, its European immigrants bundled up in woollen jackets and hats, who arrive with suitcases but gradually look just as ragged and filthy as the other louts hanging out in the saloons, these dusty villages of pioneers in which they halt to rest their horses, and finally these nuggets that are most often seen in the palms of crooks as a lure rather than in the distant rivers they hope to reach. ![]()
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