Television director Daniel Minahan’s On Swift Horses left me with extremely mixed films. By no means is it an irrevocably dishevelled work. On the other hand, some of its plotting is so pedestrian, it felt like a betrayal.
The very fact that the film has the power to evoke a sentiment as strong as betrayal proves the director and his writer Bryce Cass are on to something special. Sadly, the film loses its way in trying to find a path through what was known in the 1950s as “forbidden love.”
In ploughing gently through the fertile farm of fragile feelings, the narration encounters unforeseen hurdles, much of it of the most vapid variety.
When we first meet the film’s very lovely heroine Muriel (Daisy Edgar-Jones), she reminded me of Madhabi Mukherjee as Charulata in Satyajit Ray’s film. The same smouldering yearning, a longing for something that her arid marriage cannot provide.
The arrival of her insanely handsome brother-in-law (quite like Soumitra Chatterjee in Charulata) in Muriel’s home in California, triggers off Muriel’s libidinous yearning. We could say, Muriel goes from yawn to yawn-sambandh (sexual relations), breaking free of the boundaries that an American housewife was supposed to strictly abide by in the 1950s.
In the meanwhile, Muriel’s brother-in-law Julius is busy in Las Vegas breaking his own boundaries. Julius, sadly for Muriel and fortunately for her marriage, is gay. The parts of this fragile and borderline-flimsy film where Julius meets and mates with Henry (Diego Calva, the Mexican actor from Narcos) in Las Vegas, are shot with an excursive elan lacking in the rest of the film.
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Muriel’s marital life with her husband Lee (Will Poulter) struck me as exceedingly wishy-washy. It is that way in a convenient screenwriting way.
Luckily, Lee is not conveniently portrayed as an alcoholic wifebeater. But the personality difference between Lee and his brother Julius is purposely polarized even in the way the two men are shot on camera, as an impetus for Muriel to stray towards her brother-in-law.
In fact, the first time when we see Julius, he is shirtless and uncaring about his nakedness, something that Soumitra Chatterjee would have never done or been in Charulata.
The mood of nocturnal melancholy is seductively manifested in almost every frame. This film is leaden with mood and passion. But it all seems somewhat over-planned and under-nourished.
Why must Muriel have an unexpected “secret love” life with her fey neighbour Sandra (Sasha Calle), even as she is magnetically attracted to her husband’s brother? Muriel’s husband, sensing his wife’s attraction towards his brother, warns Muriel that Julius is not “one of us.”
The leaps of faith that underline the delicate relationships in On Swift Horses are at times breached by the banal writing. These beautiful people deserved to be in a better-written film.
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