Roberto Minervini’s new film, which premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, is the second feature in this festival round to be titled The Damned.
Another movie with the same English-language title, directed by Thordur Palsson and featured at the Tribeca Film Festival, was also set in a period setting, and talked about moral compromises and emotional tolls extreme circumstances can take on human beings. (See review linked below.) Minervini’s feature ventures to explore similar ideas, setting the story in 1862 during the Civil War, somewhere along the borderlands of the Western territories.
The Damned (orig. Il Dannati) starts off with a prolonged shot of some wolves ripping into an animal carcass, a grim image that doesn’t promise opistimistic things for the main characters, a volunteer company of soldiers who patrol the border regions. The men are quickly losing the thread of what they are really doing and, more importantly, why are they even here. They're spending time sitting around and talking about each other's reasons for joining in, the value of family versus country and, most of all, about God.
The forces on the opposite side seem to be lost too. They arrive unseen at some point and attack, engaging in a chaotic shootout with the heroes. Not much changes afterwards: the invisible opponents dissolve into the misty air, the weather changes and the snow starts falling, while the remaining men continue wandering through the wastelands.
Their journey is fully made of contradictions. It’s beautifully shot, with patented shallow focus and mellow light, and at the same time, is decidedly mundane. There is barely a coherent narrative here, but a lot of ideas are thrown out in its place.
The aesthetics lean heavily into naturalism, almost documentary style. At the same time, there is an obvious artificial construct at the core of it all. The dialogue sounds like it was mostly improvised and spoken in the modern times wording, by modern men –- because they are.
The characters are mostly played by non-actors, and their musings about the nature of things are also indeed free-style. For years, Roberto Minervini specialized in docufiction explorations of contemporary reality (such as Stop the Pounding Heart, The Other Side and What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?), and his latest film, despite formally being a live-action feature, continues this trend in both style and spirit.
So, The Damned feels a lot like its characters do: a bit lost. In the inner world of the movie, this sense of being stuck is actually interesting, invoking parallels with John Ford's great anti-western The Searchers. The 1956 film forewent the traditional Western trajectory for the characters obsessively going around in circles for five years to the point where it seemed they've been actually dead the whole time.
The heroes’ journey in Minervini’s film certainly feels a lot like this. But the authors seem to aim for more than that, charging into the Jarhead territory by showcasing the mundane dullness of war, and then going straight for Terrence Malick’s philosophy lessons.
Throughout all this, it’s kind of hard to be emotionally invested in the characters who are basically concepts riding atop very confused horses. At least the horses are relatable.
The film enjoys its U.S. Premiere this week at the New York Film Festival.