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Rating:
"It is preferable not to travel with a dead man" (Henri Michaux)
A hallucination. An initiation journey to the beyond.
Dead Man is a western. Stretched, drugged. A story that progresses through flashes, surreal. Johnny Depp wanders pale and incredulous, like a shadow, William Blake is dead.
An almost metaphysical black and white, an experience of inner desert. The feelings, the electric shocks, randomly traverse the narrative flow, they float. Moments of intensity are not the violent deaths or unexpected dangers; rather seeing a deer pass by, observing the profiles of a bare forest, peering at Indian tents from the train window.
A film that transcends the genre, but is also a farce. Pretentious, epic, grotesque, memorable, at times poetic. The minutes of ecstatic contemplation, the dialogues sometimes senseless, the indifference with which the critical moments are resolved, everything contributes to cloud the mind. Slowly the rhythm frays until it becomes a dreamlike flight.
Neil Young's guitar performs a pagan rite. It emerges here and there, it jolts. A psalm, a hymn to untouched nature. Electric. Now it lingers on a redwood forest, on a cloudy sky, on an abandoned village. Occasionally it pierces, often it takes on the tones of an indigenous song. It supports the silences.
William Blake is wounded, he's lost blood. He can't stand, but he must. Heavy eyelids, laborious movements, blurred vision. He walks and falls, gets back up; the figures and things around him watch him like ghosts.
William Blake is dead.
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