FILM EXAMINES REALITIES OF AMERICA’S ‘TRUE’ WEST

By Dimitri Keramitas

When does a cliché qualify as a bonafide archetype (and vice versa)?

Kate Beecroft's East of Wall (released in France as The New West) is a telling example. It ranks among numerous films (and much fiction) about the new west or "true" west (there is even a Sam Shepard play with that title). Often these offer little more than an updating or a mirror image of the Old West, as the "anti-Western" goes back to the 1960s: The Wild Bunch, Soldier Blue, Little Big Man, exposing the perfidious nature of America's colonization of the Plains and violence perpetrated against Native Americans. More recently, we've had movies with a queer twist (Brokeback Mountain) and quirky heroines (the True Grit remake). In 2022 Jordan Peele gave us Nope, a Black Western/sci-fi feature.

The New West / East of Wall, which won an audience award at Sundance 2025, is part of that ongoing tradition. The story takes place near the Badlands of South Dakota, and the main plot concerns a small rancher dealing with a bigger, richer rancher trying to buy her out. So far, so cliché.

The owner of the small ranch is Tabatha (Tabatha Zimiga), a woman - complete with nose-ring, tattoos and distinctive haircut; her gender offers something different. But what's really different is that in addition to the protagonist, the world of the film is mostly female. These include children (especially Tabatha's daughter Porshia), step-kids, and others who have been given shelter. The men are dead, feckless or have absconded. Tabatha does have a partner (male), but he's self-effacing. The ranch is also multi-cultural, with whites, Hispanic residents, and Native Americans co-existing.

This is not some proto-matriarchal utopia. Tabatha's family set-up has an old-woman-who-lives-in-a-shoe quality - it looks as if it's perpetually teetering on the edge of breakdown. Children have school issues. A bureaucratic court system refuses to give Tabatha legal custody over a child. A girl's mother (as feckless as some of the deadbeat dads) dumps her daughter on Tabatha with scant notice.

Despite all this, her spread is a working horse ranch, raising and breaking in horses for sale at auction. Like the children she saves, some of the horses were on the way to the glue factory or some other future of oblivion, when she took them in. 

A main source of fascination in the film comes from the concrete workings of the ranch: how the horses are broken, the mechanics of auctions, managing workers, the profiles of those who buy the horses, the financial dimension. It's a paradox that the business provides a sort of clockwork stability for the Zimiga clan, but also monetary stress: sometimes the clockwork pops a spring.

The director's initial technique is to shove our faces into the family chaos, with attendant jarring imagery and loud noises. It's a cinema verité approach, with a camera that seems unmoored. And yet Beecroft is also capable of pulling back for stunning long-shots of the Badlands scenery, reminiscent of the photographer Ansel Adams. If at the beginning of The New West, Beecroft leans into an immersive but off-putting style, formally the film is a voyage towards a tenuous balance with a style that is more distanced, without being merely pictorial. 

Tabatha herself is a kind of horse whisperer, able to cajole difficult animals into tranquil docility. But at the beginning of the film, she finds herself unable to personally take on new horses. She's been disempowered by her husband's suicide. Instead, she lets others take care of the work, sometimes not all that well. One exception is her daughter Porshia, who seems to have inherited her mother's gifts. But she too is afflicted by her father's death, and blames her mother for it. Resolving these lines of tension is the deeper plot of the movie.

There is also Tabatha's mother (Jennifer Ehle), providing yet another line of tension. At least she accepts blame for her past mistakes and misdeeds. She now provides help to Tabatha, emotional support to Porshia, and in general oversees the goings-on at the ranch. She's something of a seer, and concocts a mean brew of moonshine that's good for whatever ails you. Beyond (or beneath) the mumbo-jumbo, we get a powerful sense of pain crossing generational boundaries, and the premature loss of innocence, of babies having babies.

The women are sublime in their roles. Tabatha Zimiga and Porshia Zimiga play, in effect, themselves. They are identified as such in the credits, with the implication that their characters are autofictional. We can't know for sure, with this style of docu-drama. They have the authenticity we associate with so-called non-actors when they're in a film for the first time. But in The New West it seems deeper: the personalities are impacted in the characters, the emotions so tactile you can touch them. The other performances - minor players, walk-ons, even extras - are also fine, even if we have the sense that the director carefully choreographed them, putting them through the paces of their roles. 

Aside from the missing and feckless, the local men seem mostly functional. The XY fly-in-the-ointment is Roy Waters (Scoot McNairy). He's the cliché (or archetype) of the man who arrives to shake things up. He's a successful rancher, from Texas (of course). McNairy inhabits his role convincingly, with nods to actors like Kris Kristofferson, Sam Shepard, Jeff Bridges, except that he's more talkative, more of a huckster.

Before Waters and Tabatha make a decision about a possible purchase, they agree (rather she accepts his suggestion) to let him co-manage to see how they fit together, or not. For the most part it's "not". We feel we've seen this movie before: He drastically improves the fortunes of the ranch (even using TikTok as a marketing tool), but becomes increasingly Captain Queeg-like, alienating the ranch's hands (including Tabatha's supposed companion).

There's another complication: Porshia takes to him. Waters develops her talents and skills in rodeo in a way that Tabatha hasn't (or perhaps it's that Porshia hasn't let her). She clearly sees him as a father figure. He does some emotional projecting too, for his own daughter has died. Inadvertently this brings the mother-daughter conflict to a head, and at one point a distressed Porshia gallops off to the Badlands on her horse.

The Badlands here are a powerful, evocative, multi-levelled image, as witnessed through Austin Shelton’s cinematography. The lunar landscape is dry, eroded, with no agriculture, covered with gorges, ravines, and ridges. There was water here once, Porshia observes (she likes to muse on the prehistory of the place), but natural processes have turned it into a vista of waste long after it was home to the Sioux. Perhaps this evokes the desolate social and familial conditions depicted in the film? It also points to something awe-inspiring, beyond the normal human ken. If nothing else it makes a great place to escape to.

The Badlands have often featured in Westerns (not to mention the original Planet of the Apes). Terence Malick's brilliant first feature (about a murderous couple on the run) was called Badlands. He managed the feat of transforming the Badlands into a deluxe, personalized Garden of Eden (but then Malick, like Roy Waters, is a Texan).

You can hide out in the Badlands for a while but you can't stay there forever. That goes in a literal way for Porshia. That goes just as much in terms of a metaphorical Badlands, the recent past, for Tabatha. Also the more distant past for Tabatha's mother. Much of the emotional action in The New West is recursive, circling back to the father's death and even further, then returning to the present and back again.

It's ironic that in this self-consciously female picture, it's the man who is the catalyzing agent, forcing the issues onto a contemporary scene littered with shards of regret, acrimony, and maimed love. But in the end a richly satisfactory irony: We get the clichés of the Western genre, the archetypes of primordial myth, but are also witness to the inescapable realities (heartbreaking, transcendent) of lives as they are lived in the present moment. - SWAN

Production: Tanbark Pictures, Stetson's Kingdom, Station Road. Distribution: Pyramide Films. Photos courtesy of Pyramide Films. In French cinemas from May.

Dimitri Keramitas is a Paris-based writer and legal expert.