This haunting debut by Felipe Gálvez Haberle dismantles the violent colonial trappings of the classic western.
IIt’s to decide whether Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s baroque range western, The Settlers, is a response to or continuation of the romanticised colonial violence that was once a mainstay of the genre’s classic era. It’s certainly a film that’s been aggressively sapped of the comic-book colour and peacocking machismo of yore, instead presenting a new frontier characterised by squalid violence and widespread confusion.
Tierra del Fuego 1901, and young, part-indigenous mestizo Segundo (Camilo Arancibia) assists in constructing a border fence that snakes into the infinite horizon. Displaced English gang boss Alexander MacLennan (an effectively brusque Mark Stanley) has zero truck for those unable to put in a solid shift, executing injured workers like one would a lame horse.
The overseer is called upon by land baron Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro) to blast a path through to the sea to ensure safe crossings for livestock, the intimation being the land should be cleared of everything and everyone, no questions asked.
And so, Alexander, Segundo and a mouthy hired gun named Bill (Benjamin Westfall) head off into the wilderness on a covert mission of, if not all-out genocide, then a managed cultural erasure where indigenous people must make the choice of adapt to western manners or suffer the consequences. Segundo, meanwhile, is trapped in the moral bind of having sympathies for both sides, but who is also a victim of this system and must kill on command.
At its core, The Settlers is a film about capitalism and its discontents, as it threads the needle between the avaricious needs of the trade barons and their eagerness to use violence as a means to an end. Yet Haberle notes that, within the capitalist system, everyone is a loser apart from the one person (usually a man) on top, as the members of our small retinue discover on their perilous journey.
Though there is much emphasis on the daunting majesty of the Chilean landscape, there are regular episodes of shocking violence that arrive in a variety of extremes. A team of security guards drink and fight through the boredom of protecting a cartographer going about his business. A displaced and ultra-nationalistic British officer (played by Sam Spruell) has gone a tad Colonel Kurtz from his time in duty.
Plus there’s a brilliantly-choreographed, but dismally depressing sequence in which the majority of an indigenous tribe are executed as they wake – with a complete negation of the heroism and derring-do that are usually characteristic of such scenes. Again, this is the western as a dried, coruscating corpse, left out for the buzzards to feed on.
In the end, Haberle is interested in collecting up all these examples of colonial pillage that help build towards an worthwhile thesis, but not, alas, a particularly rounded drama. A lengthy coda in which we return to the more refined surroundings of the Don, who muses on what went on out there under his name, closes out the film on a dark whisper rather than a howl of despair.
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Published 8 Feb 2024
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