The desert is so colourful. The flowers, which grow in clusters between rocks, are bright yellow. The sky above is mesmerizingly blue. And the blood is as red as only blood can be. First thing about the western series The English What strikes you is how fantastically it’s filmed. Her pictures are composed so precisely that some shots sting your eyes. Silhouettes against the light, faces in the glaring light of the sun.
And what faces. That’s next. Emily Blunt plays an English noblewoman who has come to avenge her dead son. Her face – “men notice it,” says her companion, and that that’s an advantage because it gives her a few milliseconds advantage when shooting – you can hardly look away from it, so many emotions flit across it: sadness, serenity, determination , Insight into the absurdity of existence and belief, despite everything, in something like meaning and maybe also: love. Her companion is Eli Whipp (Chaske Spencer), a Pawnee, on his way to a piece of land he was promised as a reward for his service in the Army. He suspects that he will never get it because of the color of his skin. But he has to go somewhere in this world that has taken the homeland away from the natives.
There is a constant saving and being saved between these two and what great satisfaction there is in that. The fine lady, who initially had a bright red silk taffeta dress in her luggage for the Wild West, quickly transformed into a fighter. When she confronts a villain, she often explains herself and appears naïve for a moment, as if the bullies could take her by surprise. But then she pulls the trigger. “I’m not afraid,” she says. Not because she has hope, but: “Because I’m already dead.”
The white men aren’t heroes here, they made the prairie hell
Author and director Hugo Blick has his characters say such classic western phrases and it works because the characters are so complex and new. No cowboys, no tough sheriffs. But a pale English lady and an aborigine. The white men are not heroes here, they have made the prairie hell with their greed and unleashed brutality pent up in the European class system. In one scene, a wilderness guide says to a young lord who has loyally served the rulers in England that America’s freedom is not necessarily good for his morals.
Maybe it is The English It has become such a masterpiece precisely because Hugo Blick finally does away with the myth of the Wild West as an empty land: The prairie was just as little empty as the invaders from Europe could start anew in it. Everyone came with luggage, even if it was a silk taffeta dress as red as blood.
The Englishsix episodes on MagentaTV.
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