The cost of paradise
There is barely any dialogue in Far West, Pierre-François Sauter’s quiet film of the lives of others in the former Portuguese island colony of #Cape Verde#. The island – some 350 miles off the Atlantic coast of western Africa – has begun developing a big game fishing industry in recent years. Western tourists – conspicuously wealthy, overweight and white compared with the locals – come to chase dreams of catching the majestically splendid blue marlins, one of the largest ocean fish, boasting about landing 950lb (430kg) specimens on social media.
Different lives
Angela and Jair’s lives could not be more different. The couple lives in a tiny breeze-block home, cooking over open fires and fishing on the black volcanic beaches for much smaller prey than marlins.
The two are not talkative. Angela barely says a word throughout the film, and an air of #depression at the poverty they endure hovers over her.
Sauter, who grew up in #Mozambique and now lives in Lausanne, Switzerland, used to take holidays in Cape Verde as a child. His parents were involved in the anti-colonial revolution in Mozambique, and he was the only white boy at his school. This helped him fit in with the local community in Cape Verde, where he invested years in gradually building trust with Angela and Jair before moving from shooting stills to filming the couple. When he found the presence of crew interfered with the process, he downsized to just himself, a camera and a tripod.
The couple lives in a tiny breeze-block home, cooking over open fires and fishing on the black volcanic beaches for much smaller prey than marlins.
Building meaning
With so little dialogue and virtually no explanation about the film’s subject, the viewer is left to build meaning through beautifully composed shots and some context from social media posts made by the big game fishermen.
This slow-moving, gentle film leaves one with a sense of poignancy—that the #nature and beauty that attract tourists are also an oppressive and ever-present reality for those for whom poverty seems inescapable.
Sauter paces the film with a long, slow introduction that focuses on the daily lives of his subjects—the days spent hiking out across volcanic rock-strewn wastelands to the rough waters of the Atlantic, where Jair must first find crabs for bait before fishing with a rod and line from the narrow, stony beach. We see them collecting firewood, cooking, eating, and sleeping.
Gradually, the director shows us how this ancient way of life is being disrupted by tourism, which is both welcome for the income it brings, but evidently a threat to an older, more meditative way of life.
The film pivots around a scene where a drum band plays energetically as Angela dances while Jair watches. Sauter has denied staging any of the scenes, although he admits to having provided rum for the drummers.
Under turbulence
The vulgarity of the tourists – seen in #social media# posts boasting of their exploits – and the weighing of a dead marlin that is strung up from a tree before being butchered is balanced by yet more images of Angela and Jair going about their lonely fishing pursuits.
In closing shots worth waiting for, we finally get to see a magnificent blue marlin swimming in the ocean, vivid in its sleek colours, seeming to fly along beneath turbulent blue clouds as it skims just below the surface of the ocean.
Those who are captivated by Sauter’s film should look out for his next, Animal Dream – which tells the story of the life of a cow from birth through to death in a slaughterhouse on the same farm where it is reared. Sauter also plans to have practically no dialogue in the new film.
