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English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star – an elegant, dapper presence – and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko.
The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man.
Cox transplants some of this tale to the American old west of the late 19th century. He plays Strindler, a spindly and cadaverous fellow with elaborate courtly manners, a fastidious suit and bowler hat. Strindler sometimes claims to be a government official and sometimes an itinerant preacher. Having checked in at a fly-blown hotel, he exerts himself to make the acquaintance of the local notables, including the sheriff and mayor, to whom he sycophantically loses at cards.
Strindler has a proposition to make: he will pay bafflingly large amounts of money for lists of dead Mexicans who have died on their land or in their employ. This exploitative and racist world being what it is, there are an awful lot of Mexican names to be “farmed” in this way, and it is Strindler’s sinister plan to sell them on to government departments who want evidence that undesirable aliens are being excluded from American territory. But in another, stranger sense, Strindler is offering a kind of cleansing or redemption: he will take these dead people off their hands.
Strindler is a kind of proto-ICE drifter, although with a distinctive, quaint kind of innocence, and for all that he is a crook through and through, Cox shows that Strindler is outranked in crookedness by pretty much everyone he meets. He is out of his depth, and never more so when challenged to a gunfight: a duel that ends in bloody chaos, after which the recording authorities take the view that one should print the legend and not the truth.
Dead Souls has a distinctive indie-budget look, of which Cox makes a virtue by presenting the action almost as a theatrical chamber piece. Bizarre and fruity characters pop up on the parched landscape. Dead men will raise themselves and start singing. Sometimes Strindler will dream he has been catapulted into an American future during a third world war in which his services are needed to buy the names of dead Russians, Chinese and Peruvians.
It is a diverting and watchable love letter to the spaghetti west of the movies, and a satirical thorn in the flesh of Trumpian politics.
English (US) ·