Three years after “Falling”, Viggo Mortensen gets back behind the camera. The family drama is followed by the western “Until the End of the World”, carried by Vicky Krieps and dedicated to her mother, to be seen from May 1 at the cinema.
What does it talk about ?
The American West, in the 1860s. After meeting Holger Olsen, an immigrant of Danish origin, Vivienne Le Coudy, a resolutely independent young woman, agrees to follow him to Nevada, to live with him. But when the Civil War breaks out, Olsen decides to enlist and Vivienne finds herself alone. She must now face Rudolph Schiller, the corrupt mayor of the city, and Alfred Jeffries, an important landowner.
Above all, he must resist the more than insistent advances of Weston, Alfred’s brutal and unpredictable son. When Olsen returns from the front, he and Vivienne are no longer the same. They must learn to know themselves again to accept themselves as they have become…
3 good reasons to see Until the End of the World
If you are a completist of Viggo Mortensen’s work, you may already have your ticket. If you plan to take advantage of its release on a public holiday to do as many sessions as possible, too. Otherwise, here are other arguments.
1 – Viggo Mortensen director: second!
Actor, photographer, painter, poet… and therefore director! Viggo Mortensen has well deserved to be considered one of the most exciting protean artists of the moment, and he likes to remind us of it. Three years after Falling, his first production, here he is again in front of and behind the camera, with Until the End of the World (or The Dead Don’t Hurt in original version). After a family drama against the backdrop of a father-son relationship, spread over half a century, he goes back in time, heading to the American West of the 1860s. For a western then.
If he cited Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu as the main source of visual inspiration for his film released in May 2021, we think a lot of John Ford and Howard Hawks, masters of the classic western. Or to Clint Eastwood, because At World’s End sometimes reminds us of a more humanist version of Merciless. With a more fragmented chronology (we don’t start at the end, but almost), poetic-dreamlike impulses and a very beautiful female lead.
2 – Luminous Vicky Krieps
If he played the main role of Falling, opposite an impressive Lance Henriksen, Viggo Mortensen is a little further behind here. Because the central character is none other than that of Vicky Krieps: Vivienne Le Coudy, a fiercely independent young woman who finds herself alone when the man she agreed to follow to Nevada goes to the front during the Civil War. .
In front of the camera of the ex-Aragorn from Lord of the Rings, the Wild West becomes no less brutal for women and this absence will have profound repercussions on the two main characters. And we sometimes think of Hold Me Strong by Mathieu Amalric, another story of absence in which we only see Vicky Krieps.
Revealed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, she never ceases to impress with constant accuracy, whether it is showing strength in the face of men who want to rush her, or gentleness with her husband and resilience while he is at the front. And the look that Viggo Mortensen has on her is all the sweeter because it is 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 already intended to pay homage to him in Falling, the idea of which came to him while he was returning from his funeral, but it was ultimately the shadow of his father which took over, as in his life. The actor and director therefore rectifies the situation with this western.
“Everything I do as an artist – whether it’s writing, performing or painting – comes from a need to communicate, to share my experiences”Viggo Mortensen tells us, during his visit to Paris. “For any viewer, myself included, it’s sometimes an effort to remember what’s going on in life at one point or another.”
“Between Falling and At World’s End, there is an evolution of my thoughts, of feelings towards the experiences of my childhood. My point of view on my father, on my mother. The first image that I had in mind when I started writing Falling, she was also my mother. As with Until the End of the World, I imagined her life, I had the image of this little girl who plays and dreams in an oak forest. close to the one she knew as a child.”
Between Falling and At World’s End, there is an evolution of my thoughts, of feelings towards the experiences of my childhood. My point of view on my father, on my mother
Is it to avoid the risk of falling into biography that Viggo Mortensen chose to make his film a western? “At first, I didn’t know it was going to be one. Then, little by little, I placed this girl and this woman in the Western United States, in the 19th century, and it became one. Like many boys of my generation, I grew up with westerns, in cinema and on television. There were more of them than for children today. Seeing westerns in the cinema is no longer considered normal. nowadays.”
“And then I learned to ride horses at a very young age. Around the same time that I started going to the movies with my mother. So I’ve always loved classic westerns, even though most of them aren’t good films. They are almost all clumsy and naive, not very original. But I like the genre. But I thought it would suit the story of a free, independent and stubborn woman. .”
A woman whose life and struggles you can discover in the beautiful, very personal film by Viggo Mortensen, in theaters on May 1st.
Comments collected by Maximilien Pierrette in Paris on April 10, 2024