Savage State

Since his film debut, David Perrault has manifested a great love for American cinema. While »Our Heroes Died Tonight« placed film noir in 1960s Paris, his new film is a dreamlike hommage to American westerns which he fills with a cineaste‘s love for detail. When the civil war threatens the safety and securityof a bourgeois family of French colonialists in Missouri, Edmond – the patriarch– decides to bring his wife and three daughters back to France. Victor, a former mercenary, is supposed to provide security on the long ride east, but his presence produces the opposite effect. Tensions erupt between the travelers and it soon becomes clear that they are being followed, as the female outlaw Bettie and her gang are chasing Victor. Like Sam Fuller in »Forty Guns«, Perrault fills his western with longings and sexual obsessions places strong women at the center and tells a through and through feminist story. And like Fuller, Perrault is not averse to move his visual direction to unusual terrain. Long slow-motion sequences and dreamy perspectives transform the good, old western into a sensual fever dream where the gun is always in the hand of a woman.