Viggo Mortensen returns behind the camera: why you should see the western At World’s End in the cinema?

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American West In the 1860s, after meeting Holger Olsen, a Danish immigrant, Vivienne Le Coud, a fiercely independent young woman, agrees to follow him to Nevada and live with him. But when the civil war breaks out, Olsen decides to enlist and Vivienne finds herself alone. He must now face the city’s corrupt mayor, Rudolph Schiller, and prominent landowner Alfred Jeffries.

First, she must resist the persistent advances of Weston, Alfred’s cruel and unpredictable son. When Olsen returns from the front, he and Vivienne are no longer the same. They must learn to know themselves again in order to accept themselves as they have become…

3 good reasons to see the end of the world

If you’re a fan of Viggo Mortensen’s work, you might already have your ticket. If you’re going to take advantage of its release on a public holiday to get as many sessions as possible. Otherwise, here are other arguments.

1 – Viggo Mortensen Director: Second!

Actor, photographer, artist, poet… and therefore a director! Viggo Mortensen has earned his reputation as one of the most exciting protean artists of the moment, and he likes to be reminded of it. Three years after The Fall, his first feature, here he is again in front of and behind the camera in Until the End of the World (or It doesn’t hurt to be dead in the original version). Following a family drama set against the backdrop of a father-son relationship spanning more than half a century, it goes back in time and heads to the American West of the 1860s.

If he cites Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu as the main source of visual inspiration for his May 2021 film, we’re thinking a lot of John Ford and Howard Hawks, masters of the classic Western. Or Clint Eastwood, because At World’s End sometimes reminds us of a more humanistic version of Merciless. With a more fragmented chronology (we don’t start at the end, but almost), poetic-dream impulses and a very beautiful female lead.

2 – Glowing Vicky Cripps

If he played the lead role in Falling opposite the impressive Lance Henriksen, Viggo Mortensen is a bit of an underachiever here. Because the central character is none other than Vicky Cripps: Vivienne Le Coud, a fiercely independent young woman who finds herself alone when the man she agreed to accompany her to Nevada goes to the front during the Civil War.

Former Lord of the Rings Aragorn cameraman sees the Wild West become less brutal towards women, and this absence will have a profound effect on the two main characters. And we sometimes think of Matteo Amalric’s Hold Me Strong, another story of absence in which we only see Vicky Cripps.

Revealed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s ghostly thread, she never fails to impress with constant precision, whether it’s showing strength in front of the men who want to rush her, or ease with her husband and tenacity while she’s on the front lines. And Viggo Mortensen’s face is sweeter because it’s personal.

3 – Viggo Mortensen pays tribute to his mother

At World’s End is dedicated to a certain Grace Gamble Atkinson. Who is none other than Viggo Mortensen’s mother. The latter was already planning a tribute to him in the Falling, the idea of ​​which came to him while returning from the funeral, but in the end his father’s shadow took over him, as in his life. So the actor and the director are fixing the situation with this western.

“Everything I do as an artist – whether it’s writing, performing or painting – comes from the need to communicate, to share my experiences.”– Viggo Mortensen tells us during his visit to Paris. “For any viewer, myself included, it’s sometimes trying to remember what’s going on in life at one point or another.”

“Between the fall and the end of the world is the evolution of my thoughts, feelings about my childhood experiences. My view of my father, my mother. The first image that comes to mind when I started writing the fall. She was also my mother, like before the end of the world, I had this image of this little girl who Playing and dreaming in the oak forest.

Between the fall and the end of the world is the evolution of my thoughts, feelings about my childhood experiences. My point of view about my father, my mother

Did Viggo Mortensen choose his film Western to avoid the risk of getting into a biography? “At first I didn’t know it would be. Then, little by little, I put this girl and this woman in the western United States in the 19th century, and it became one. Like a lot of my boys. I grew up with westerns, and there was more in the movies and on TV than For today’s kids.

“And then I learned to ride a horse at a very young age. Around the same time I started going to the movies with my mother. So I’ve always loved classic westerns, even though most of them aren’t good movies. They almost are. All clumsy and naive, not very original, but I thought it suited the story of a free, independent and stubborn woman.

A woman whose life and struggle you can discover in Viggo Mortensen’s beautiful, deeply personal film, in theaters May 1.

Commentaries collected by Maximilien Pierret in Paris on April 10, 2024