Spanish director Rodrigo Sorogoyen reportedly said he wanted to make The Beasts (As Bestas, in Spanish) “as a western”. To a large extent that’s what he’s done. This is like a western where two opposing and implacable forces square off in a lawless milieu. John Ford might have made this, back in the day. If he had I wonder how much shorter he’d have made it.
The story it tells is a true one, of a Dutch couple moving to a remote Spanish village to start a new life, then falling out badly with their neighbours until one day a moment of reckoning arrives. For the factual account, the true-crime documentary Santoalla (2015) will give you all the nitty gritty.
Sorogoyen and co-writer Isabel Peña have taken some liberties in their version, most obviously in the names and nationality of the central couple. The Netherlands husband and wife Martin and Margo have become French Antoine and Olga in this retelling. But the bare bones of the case remain. The new arrivals have moved to this broken-down part of depopulated Northern Spain to start anew and live the good life, growing organic veg and selling it on the market. And for a while things are OK with the scant few neighbours they have. Until a proposal arrives to build a wind farm locally, which almost all the natives are very keen on – they’ll take the money and run – but which Antoine and Olga vote against.
It here that Sorogoyen and Peña start their telling of the story, which soon has all the hallmarks of a familiar scenario. Liberal bien-pensants on one side versus the bitter left-behinds on the other, neither really understanding or even trying to understand the other side’s point of view as small skirmishes cascade into all-out battles and chalked-in dotted lines become trenches in a bitter culture war. Or put another way, another indictment of the neoliberal “small state” where the market-forces approach to civil society (ie “you’re on your own”) prevails.
Powerful performances help with the sense of escalating dread. One one side Denis Ménochet – a guarantor of excellence – and Marina Foïs as the nice organic homesteaders (if this were a western). On the other Luis Zahera, giving a brilliantly abrasive and angry performance as Xan, the middle-aged Galician stuck in the town he was born in. He’d be a rancher keen to keep the fences up if this were a western, though this rancher doesn’t have much of a ranch and has no wife because all the women have left for more agreeable lives elsewhere, so is left behind with his addle-brained brother Lorenzo (Diego Anido, another great performance) and his mother (Luisa Merelas).
The Beasts is the title, recalling in an echo Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”, because we’re in little doubt who the villains are here, even though Sorogoyen and Peña go to some lengths to present Antoine in particular as not entirely lacking culpability for what goes down. Antoine, the North European, recording all the encounters with Xan on his camera. Antoine calling the police in. Antoine doing it all by the book, the liberal bourgeois way of gaming the system.
It’s a powerful, dark and grim story, which has been told satisfyingly with 50 minutes of running time still on the clock. Stop it there and you have a brilliant movie in its own right. But Sorogoyen and Peña, out of loyalty to the story itself, then shift focus from Antoine to Olga, and the genre shifts from western to crime drama.
This fealty to the facts is a mistake, and if the writer and director don’t know it, all the actors do. Foïs attempts to fix it by increasing the intensity of her acting, which makes things worse. And so does Marie Colomb, who arrives late in the day as the couple’s daughter, a fount of “get the hell out of Dodge” wisdom. But nothing they can do can fix the problem. Watch the movie. It’s brilliant… until it suddenly isn’t. Without giving too much away, the point where you should abandon it is blindingly clear.
The Beasts (As Bestas) – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
