By Jake Howell jake.howell@utoronto.ca
Cannes Review: The Salvation
Known as a member of Dogme 95, Danish director Kristian Levring (2000’s The King is Alive) returns to the Croisette with out-of-Competition title The Salvation, a film Levring calls a “tribute to the classic American Western.” And it is: Levring’s directorial repeater shoots at all the marks and repeatedly hits the bulls-eye, nailing the tone and tropes of the genre. It’s one of the slickest, most entertaining entries in recent memory.
The tagline for The Salvation: “bad men will bleed.” That’s a fairly basic, epitaph-sounding plot summary for films in the Western canon; here, it summarizes a revenge narrative that pits Jon (Mads Mikkelsen) against a posse of villains who are terrorizing the fictional town of Black Creek. Acting more with his eyes and less with his lines (not a criticism), Mikkelsen as quiet immigrant Jon recalls Viggo Mortensen’s Tom Stall in A History of Violence, David Cronenberg’s 2005 portrayal of a man hoping to move on from his vicious past. As for The Salvation, the Great Dane’s Jon, an ex-soldier, is a gunslinger first and a family man second, and when tragedy befalls his wife and son, so begins the gritty elimination of the men responsible. Word gets to the odious outlaw Delarue (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) that Jon has killed his brother, and the scene is set for a showdown that is pitch-perfect from beginning to end.
It isn’t a Western without the West looking its very best, and Levring’s trusted cinematographer Jens Schlosser frames visually stunning images here. The film looks and feels remarkably like Monument Valley, where Black Creek is ostensibly set (with its looming sandstone buttes as the backdrop), yet the production was shot on location in South Africa—an accomplishment that reminds of The Salvation’s dead-on design. But of all the visual elements that make this a outstanding oater, most important is to mention that the color contrast here has been cranked way, way up: Sin City and other graphic novel reference points immediately come to mind, with deep grainy shadows and vivid reds boasting beautifully through the action. Surprisingly, these crimsons rarely come from blood and brains, and in terms of the gun violence there’s less gore than expected (oh, but there’s so many deaths). Rather, the costumes, environments, and lived-in sets are wet with glorious color, and this aesthetic richness works wonderfully for the homage pastiche Levring is going for.
Levring and his co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen (who won an Oscar in 1999 for his short film Valgaften) make no bones about their revenge narrative. There’s a very minor subplot of the West’s history with oil and how that affects man’s inner greed, but it’s woven around 100 minutes of Winchester headshots, stagecoaches, and thousand-yard stares. This is an unpretentious, straight-up blast of frontier fighting, and while I wasn’t able to discern a bonafide Wilhelm scream, The Salvation does, of course, come complete with the requisite Searchers shot. Yeah, this film rocks.
