Western moseys along with a German sense of humour

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      Starring Meinhard Neumann. In German and Bulgarian, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

      Modes of masculinity, colonialism, and still-living history are dissected in an offhand manner in this drily told character study. The sardonically named Western follows a bunch of aging, working-class roustabouts from Germany to a remote spot in Bulgaria, where they’ve been sent, with piss-poor instructions and very little training, to build a new power plant.

      Most of the crew are drunks and troublemakers, although in the easygoing ways of ordinary working-class yobbos. Unfortunately, the tattooed crew chief (Reinhardt Wetrek), who seems to know little about the engineering job they’re on, lives up to the worst stereotypes of German tourists, picking fights and harassing young women.

      He’s balanced, sort of, by a crinkly loner (played by Meinhard Neumann, who heads a nonpro cast) who really makes an effort to cross language and wartime-memory barriers to connect with suspicious locals. (The Nazis occupied Bulgaria, a reluctant ally with its own fascist streak.) These visiting westerners, still reconciling their two geographical Germanys, go further east, eventually hoisting their own flag on foreign soil, at their fortlike headquarters. In the end, only one goes native. Meinhard says he’s a former Foreign Legionnaire, which earns some respect from the villagers, but what does he mean by that?

      There’s even a white horse in these slow-motion shenanigans, which quietly aspire to totemic aspects of human (or at least male) behaviour under stress or without social restraint. But this is no John Ford oat opera. It has a flat, accidental aesthetic with few sweeping vistas. And writer-director Valeska Grisebach, who has collaborated before with Toni Erdmann director Maren Ade (taking a producer credit here), is less interested in totemic showdowns than in the small gestures and preconceptions that make one culture strange—or appealing—to another. That lost-at-sea quality sometimes extends to the movie itself. The two-hour effort requires patience, but rewards it, too.

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