Läif a Séil (The Last Ashes) (2023)

Type of movie: Revenge story with strong Tarantino vibes and set in Luxembourg’s “wild north” in 1854.

Type of movie, again: A Kniddelen western.

Gore score: Off the charts. Violence shocks and impresses, but while Tarantino manages a kind of comic-book funness to his violence, this isn’t (quite) achieved in Läif a Séil.

Dusk. A lonesome forest path. A hooded figure--hand hovering over a belt-strapped knife--stares down a man approaching on a cart being pulled by a single horse. The cart halts. A pregnant moment. The man goes for his gun as the figure----

At this stage (act two) of Läif a Séil, we know quite a bit about this hooded figure, our protagonist; and yet we know little. The first stanza of the film has detailed her childhood, the horrors of which shore up certain complexity in her adult character, but exactly how that misused innocent became a disciple of badassery is left to suggestion. All we eventually discover is that she went abroad, all the way to Michigan (or somewhere near the Great Lakes, anyway) to live with the Ojibwe tribe, where she picked up knife skills, tattoos and (generally speaking) an otherness stark enough to terrorise the nasty villagers of her youth, i.e. to execute her revenge fantasy.

This missing episode is potent, perhaps because its mysteriousness is so complete--I only got the Great Lakes detail from a subtitle that went “[speaking Ojibwe],” itself only clicking because (against all odds) I hail from this region--which makes its implications limitless: a dirt-poor Luxembourger vanishes to North America in the 1840s and returns a Native American warrior. She (we must assume) surely saw some crazy shit, or, really, some shit too crazy to see. The (non-)portrayal of the Ojibwe as a ghostlike influence that begets pure violence, tenacity and “savagery” is undoubtedly problematic, both for the obvious reasons (a whole culture reduced to the single off-screen functionality of activating a white protagonist) and for the obviousness of those reasons (it’s a done-to-death backstory), but in true-if-would-be Tarantinoism the screenwriters attempt to absolve themselves of cultural insensitivity by intensifying the fictiveness of the events depicted: wait till you see how she disposes of the beekeeper; it’s the kind of thing that only happens inside the silver screen, which (goes the sometimes-disputed logic) creates a reality barrier that forgives, well, everything.

At this point (still act two) the movie hits its high note. It isn’t exactly original, but all the elements are on point: the dark atmosphere, the character backstory, even a compelling wild card in the plot, with a bunch of military city-boy railway workers are laying tracks near the encampment where it’s all going down, forming a political dichotomy with the off-the-grid villagers whose lives our protagonist is keen to, let’s just say, interrupt. All the forces are converging for certain, gory fun.

Then, inexplicably, a lull: the revenge plot peters out as our hero sabotages a piece of infrastructure rather than another soul. Why has she lost her nerve? Unclear. Not in an arresting way, however. One senses that the screenwriters wanted to preserve complexity in her character by avoiding an “obvious” storyline wherein she sticks to her (literal) guns, but this narrative waffle manifests as a lack of confidence in what they have already managed to pen, i.e. a woman with a fantastic backstory held in place by mysterious off-screen episode.

By now, the movie has taught us that her character is defined by action, so when she ceases to act she ceases to be; and this comes at the worst possible moment, the halo of existing tensions tightening around what should be a merrily blood-splashy endgame à la The Hateful Eight except I’m asking myself why--after that encouraging piece of cold-blooded work with the beekeeper--she can’t even stab one of the bona-fide monsters she came there to kill while he attempts to kill her? What I take for writerly timidity is probably an attempt at subtlety, as (granted) a poetic symmetry is proposed in her male counterpart, a victim of the same childhood cruelty but who never escaped the village: she’s working from the outside, he from the inside, and they additionally make sense as potential lovers--except their bond is never activated against the larger plot, both because it simply isn’t and because we are given no access to her brainspace. Oh, well.

The Last Kingdom (2015-2023)

Type of show/movie: Drama set in ninth-century England (well, it wasn’t England yet) that follows the geopolitics of warring kings and their agents of power. (Note: it’s five seasons followed by one movie.)

Quick sell: Game of Thrones meets Entourage?

Bro show: The early seasons are empty of credible female characters, but (against all odds) this improves later on.

The low point of The Last Kingdom (not counting the film, which is more no-point than low-point) is in Season Three, when Uhtred--our hero, a Saxon raised as a Dane and therefore with a foot in both camps and neither--lies sick and dying in a wintry landscape, believing his misfortune to be the work of Skade, a sex-bomb witch whose oh-so-believable self-professed life purpose is to use her hotness to make powerful men more powerful by--I said “bro show” already, right?--bedding them. Uhtred’s wingman and fellow warrior tends to his ailing lord and, with tender sincerity, offers to kill the witch: because (one understands) only the very, very best of bros would take the time to murder the crazy bitch [sic] stalker who has cursed you.

(To clarify: she’s only a witch inside the characters’ belief system; the show is historical drama and not fantasy.)

Anyway, this Skade storyline is emblematic of the masculinity dominating the show, which follows Uhtred and his entourage as they participate in the wider geopolitics of the medieval Saxon kingdoms of Wessex and Mercia, which face existential threats from routine incursions of each-time-nastier Danish warlords with increasingly stupid names like “Bloodhair.”

It’s worth watching the show just to see how this methodology complexifies and improves across five seasons: earlier on, Uhtred’s various girlfriends are throwaways whose existence serves to deepen (or really sexualise, though the show is disappointingly chaste) the man himself as he fights in huge Saxon-versus-Dane showdowns that occur too frequently to hold real story weight (think of the seasons-long epic backstories in Game of Thrones that converge in one magnificent Battle of the Bastards; this isn’t like that); eventually, however, the show gets the hang of adding second dimensions to characters (a Dane who isn’t a vapid warmonger! a woman grappling with political power!) and--equally important in sparking watchability--starts counterbalancing its battlefield heroics with the character arcs and politics that actually give them meaning. This stride begins to be hit towards the end of Season Three, when a high-profile death creates a power vacuum in which several characters with known motivations must squirm, fight and seize, all under the doom-promising threat of Danish invaders. Twenty-five episodes is arguably a long time to wait before stride-hitting, but we do--and not everyone does--get there in the end.

It remains a bro show (not to mention a showcase for the wax-blasted neo-pompadour fades raging through 2019’s coolest barbershops; the Axe body spray is nearly smellable through the TV) that, despite some cringy gaffes like the Skade storyline, grows into a tolerable portrayal of masculinity: Uhtred goes from absentee parent to single father (albeit to grown children), mentors his junior bros in the tenets of duty and honour, and must reconcile the pressures of his political position (as a deadly, kingmaking warrior) with his personal will and wishes… all without compromising his values or, one must observe, missing leg day.