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The Proposition, is not what many would properly define as a film. Sorry, if you think otherwise, you are free to leave this reading. I won't be offended, you know? In fact, please. However, if instead you consider and are morbidly wondering why this descriptive and introductory madness of mine, well, then an explanation on my part is imperative. Very imperative indeed.
When in January 2005 I heard news of this "release," I still didn't quite know how to interpret what had driven Nick Cave to promote his dark side, the one you can grasp with great skill in the Seeds albums, leading him to undertake such work. Exactly, I was thinking ultimately after having obviously read the line-up intended to help in the venture, that I would certainly not have the chance to entertain myself with material akin to Sokurov or Herzog, but without a doubt, something would strike me in it. And how it struck me.
It struck me with elegance, with spirituality, and above all with a lot, a lot, a lot of decadence.
I'm certain, gentlemen, the film called "The Proposition" is not a film.
A film should have, depending on the undersigned (obviously), two fundamental characteristics: the ability to portray a given situation (even if abstract, regardless of the context in which it develops from a certain aesthetic point of view), and the means, suitable and intended to represent the emblem of it. But this movie, gentlemen, transcends both. What remains in the mouth, clinging to the palate, is the spirit that animates every action: dust, wind, and sun. But also blood, a lot of blood. This is indeed a standalone portrayal, in which the two characteristics to which I previously referred remain translucent throughout the unfolding of the bloody situations to which old Nick dedicates the entire screenplay. A screenplay that has unlike any in recent years managed to convey sensations in the expressions and faces of the performers (which in theory should mainly be attributed to skilful directing), such as to abandon the belief of watching a film. The direction (the true one, I mean) is entrusted to John Hillcoat, and I think that along with it came a not so easy attachment: the desert made of spirits and voices that populates Cave's mind, with its shadows, its sunsets, and its corpses. This is the setting, late 19th-century Australia, Australia made of dust stones and heat. The frightened Australia that fights modernization imposed every day by the iron arm of Her Majesty. The story seems to get lost in my words, but in reality, it matters little, because this is not a story, and if you want to know, here history, intended as political-social, also centers little. This is the reflection of an era whose twilight finds its end in our own. While God made men particular and different from one another, the gun made them equal, flattened them by giving them the universal decision-making power of life or death over others' existence. Each one an executioner and victim of one thing, himself. And it is in this that the contents stand out so majestically.
Three brothers are accused of the rape and killing of a bourgeois young woman, several months pregnant. Of the three, only one is truly guilty. The other two are captured, while the true culprit abandons and flees into the desert with his followers, one of whom is half-blood. Among the captured brothers, the youngest, Mikey, is chained and made the subject of blackmail by English Captain Stanley, while Charles (Guy Pearce) is proposed to secretly chase his brother through the Aboriginal lands devastated by heat and aridity, in order to save the remaining and clueless Mikey from the gallows. Every act of the movie takes from the initial phase an unexpected flavor, almost a prayer that leads each of the characters, misanthropists and not, to face a battle against their personal frustrations, each of which is based on an irremovable sense of resurrection that drives every single performer to apply themselves with dedication and despair to what Cave's screenplay offers so spontaneously.
The desert, the sky, and every element of nature deformed in contact with the violence and purple blood that this story knows how to confide at every moment of its fundamental evolutions. The heat and the wind will carry with them the remnants of men who from the past call us to a reality, the modern one, not much different from that inherent to the film. A poetic vision of decay in wild Australia, accompanied by a musical background (that of Cave himself and Warren Ellis) that will be able to give an additional sense of curse and resignation culminating in hope and spirit.
A fairy tale Nick Cave in the screenplay, a cast up to the task, direction not easy to tackle but more than sufficient.
The evaporation of faith.
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