Holy fuck, said I, and with good reason, the reason being that Richard Stanley's Dust Devil, from the very first frame, is unspeakably, staggeringly gorgeous.
Owl's jerk about on branches, cars rise out the heat of the desert roads like the Kraken rising up and out the ocean, lines are drawn in sand, the sun and the moon bleed o'er one another, the dust clings to the celluloid and catches in the throat.
Namibia trickles o'er the screen like water down the shoulders of the sirens. Hypnotic, incantatory stretches are torn asunder by this or that burst of the most disturbing rotten dot com imagery, then the aching cliffsides again, the swirling of the sweat on the weary brows.
What it amounts to is the most beautiful film about a demon out hell's own arse-crack wanders the highways and byways of creation killing and maiming and sexing and mumbling that you ever in your life did see.
Robert Burke appears out the maw of the Namibian sands, having trodden the Earth for as long as anyone could be bothered considering, a shape-shifting demon from "The other side of the mirror" come for to claim the lives of folks reeking with misery and desperation and a craving for to be done away with.
(A man who can sense, can smell genuine despair and lust for the noose; how useful he'd be in determining the Realness of this or that emo-fringed four-piece?)
He's rode the rails of time itself, this rugged Man With Many Names, and he's hitching his way across Namibia that he might claim the life of one Wendy Robinson.
Zakes Mokae's detective traces his movements, this inter-dimensional fiend, he ponders the ragged, mutilated bodies of past victims, he attempts for to decipher the mystical scrawls left by the corpses. He tries to do this but he's crippled no end by the memories of his wife and child, both of them lost to the gnashing of tragedy.
In and around this plot, Richard Stanley weaves the most enchanting of tapestries, a tapestry stitched from anthropology and mythology and parable and natural history, threaded through the western and the road movie and the thriller and the horror.
In his commentary track on this final cut (one of many commentary tracks he offers in this set), Stanley describes the film as "A love letter to apartheid-era South Africa", and as such the film details a landscape of the most transcendent beauty, yet haunted by the ghost of the most repugnant horror. Apartheid is touched upon frequently in the film, and there's manys an argument could made for to suggest that the Dust Devil himself (itself?) is nowt but apartheid given legs and stubble and a cowboy hat.
Article comments
1 - Iloz Zoc
Okay, you sold me on it! Will I get the girl, too, if I watch it? Hope, hope, hope.
2 - Duke De Mondo
Iloz Zoc, thanks for the comment, and i'm altogether certain you'll find this particularly bizarre wonder all the pleasing in the world.
As to the girl, i can only hope that works out for you. Maybe they'll release an even more spectacular box-set with The Girl alongside the comic book and the soundtrack and what have you.
...surely the special edition of Boxing Helena could at least entertain such a notion. it's so perfect!...
3 - Lisa McKay
Congratulations -- this review has been chosen as an Editor's Pick this week!