We no longer expected Jane Campion in the cinema. Twelve years since her last film: as much to say that she took the time. Certainly there were the two seasons of the miniseries Top of the Lake, but considering the extent of her talent, the most appropriate canvas for the filmmaker remains the big screen. However, after having probed the feminine soul in each of its projects, the one to whom we owe The Piano (The piano lesson) is interested for the first time in the male psyche. This, in the most macho genre there is: the western.
Director’s Award in Venice, The Power of the Dog (The power of the dog) does not fall within the perfect continuity of the work of Jane Campion. Co-produced by Quebecer Roger Frappier, this dazzling return, carried by a uniformly remarkable interpretation, is an adaptation of an autobiographical account by Thomas Savage published in 1967, but set in the mid-1920s.
We follow four characters: Phil and George, two brothers who own a successful ranch in Montana, as well as Rose and her son Peter. In love with Rose, a hotelier who has been widowed for several years, George proposes to her, which she accepts, to the chagrin of Phil, a domineering and cruel being.
Resistant to change, Phil constantly evokes the memory of Bronco Henry, a late cowboy who once taught them everything, George and him. Phil has kept the saddle and especially the handkerchief of this idealized Western man: a “fetishization” whose homoerotic dimension is quickly established, Jane Campion not trying to make this fundamental aspect a vulgar “ punch », But rather the psychological foundation of Phil’s character. A character who hates others because he hates himself.
Illusory power
Hence his immediate hatred of Rose and his refusal to concede to George a happiness to which he will never be entitled. For Phil, the surrounding vast expanses and assorted lifestyle don’t mean liberation, but prison. Jane Campion was already making nature, however beautiful it may be, a jail for Ada in The Piano.
The first act skillfully exposes the relationships between the characters, fluidly alternating points of view. The daily life on the ranch is presented with precision, but without ostentation.
In front of this imposing Gothic house planted in the middle of a plain, one immediately thinks of the film Giant (Giant), by George Stevens. During the passages where she marries the perspective of Rose, the director films the interior of the place like an opulent golden cage: this time we think of Isabel in the superb The Portrait of a Lady (Portrait of a woman).
In the exterior sequences, Jane Campion recalls how much she has an eye for capturing the magnificence of the landscapes while giving them a narrative value: an arid panorama echoes the now bloodless relationship between the two brothers, who lead the herd. silently ; a clear water pond located in the middle of a wooded area is the bucolic hiding place where Phil reveals himself beyond an interlacing of branches straight out of a fairy tale …
The tension builds in the second act, as Phil sets out to destroy Rose psychologically. A good man but devoid of character, George sees nothing, or very little. As the spouses’ presence shrinks, Peter’s increases in importance.
Left to study medicine, Peter arrives in the third act for the summer vacation. This fascinating section is the culmination of all that has gone before. Like Phil braiding the four strands of his lasso, Jane Campion here brings together each of the sub-plots to form one.
Without revealing the unexpected turn of the plot, we could style this final part of the subtitle “ Tadzio’s revenge As the specter of Death in Venice hovers over the dynamic that is taking place between Phil and Peter. The filmmaker dwells on the contrasts – physical, psychological – between the two characters to better reveal their true nature. Behind his manly posture, Phil has only illusory power. Conversely, an unsuspected force animates the frail Peter.
Deadly ignorance
Metaphorically, Phil represents a past (and backward) view of masculinity; a masculinity, from repressions to prohibitions, made toxic. Peter himself embodies a modernity that ignores the shackles.
Throughout, Jane Campion brilliantly subverts the codes, diktats and macho archetypes of the western. As she had done with those, also macho, associated with film noir in In the Cut (Raw), a feature film worth revisiting.
Throughout her filmography, the director has often shown how patriarchy is a brake, or worse, to the development of women. Her heroines are still struggling to free themselves from what the filmmaker qualifies as “the masculinity of domination which does harm, but which does not know itself”.
Through her deconstruction of the cowboy myth, Jane Campion sheds some light on this deadly “ignorance”.