Anthony Harvey
Eagle's Wing

LA RECENSIONE

A vast and immense space where sky and earth seem to blur together, a close-up, a final, desperate, and petulant invocation choked by tears.

Two masks of death, two figures engaged in heart-wrenching funeral rites, desert, dim light, sky swollen with gray and clouds, the wind blows between the wooden platforms, bones and ornaments of the Comanche burial site, the squaw inflicts cuts on her arms, the medicine man officiates the burial of the slain warrior, eagle wing must be sacrificed, must accompany the warrior on his last journey, the ceremony will be interrupted, a white hunter, standing aside, watches the scene with petrified amazement, he will manage to take possession of the majestic white stallion.

Dialogue reduced to the bone which, as the story progresses, will almost entirely thin out, until it dissolves and closes into a kind of resolute and willful silence, mostly acted out through glances, a pair of jet-black eyes scrutinize a horizon scorched by the sun, cerulean eyes fix on their captor with a defiant air.

The battle between two men, a Kiowa warrior and a white trapper, a nature indifferent to human dramas, ruthless to those who cannot adapt to it, a white horse, flesh projection of the same harsh, severe nature, swollen with ancient, mystical, and redemptive symbolism.

Eagle's Wing places nature at the center of everything, a succession of events linked in an almost incidental way, a plot that seems to twist on itself becoming increasingly essential, almost all protagonists seem to consume themselves, self-destructed by their desire, whatever it may be, a dry, sparse western, where the anatomy of the image on the screen seems to adopt the same dilated appearance of a sound.