“Why do you want everybody to hate you?” Directed by a co-worker to a sociopathic border guard played by Vicky Krieps, this urgent question runs through Philippe Van Leeuw’s contemporary western The Wall. The answer is key to unlocking the story, but the film-makers never quite offer a convincing explanation.
Screening in the main dramatic competition at El Gouna film festival this week, The Wall is Van Leeuw’s latest outsider snapshot of global conflict zones, having already revisited the Rwandan genocide in The Day God Walked Away (2009) and the Syrian civil war in his multiple prize-winner Insyriated, aka In Syria (2017). For his third feature, the Belgian cinematographer turned writer-director trains an outraged eye on the deep-rooted racism of white America, but he brings little new or insightful to this very well-travelled dramatic terrain. Star billing for Krieps will help snag festival interest and curious audiences, but her modest art-house marquee power cannot magically elevate this underpowered stab at scathing social critique.
Van Leeuw says he intended The Wall to depict the forces of evil in close-up detail, instead of leaving them as shadowy background figures as in his previous films. The locus of malice here is Arizona border patrol officer Jessica Comely (Krieps), a living embodiment of Donald Trump’s poisonous populist rhetoric about illegal migrants flooding north over the Mexican border. The star of Phantom Thread (2017) and Corsage (2022) gives a typically compelling performance, seething with repressed rage and knife-edge intensity, but her skills are mostly wasted in this worthy treatment of over-familiar themes.
Van Leeuw depicts Comely as a loose-cannon loner with deep scars and anger management issues. She has prickly relationships with her family, for historical reasons that the film never explains, while her sister-in-law and best friend Sally (Marla Robison) is dying of cancer. Her bleak sex life seems to entail clandestinely picking up undocumented Mexican immigrants and paying them for joyless erotic encounters at gunpoint, a psychologically intriguing subplot that deserves far more screen time and narrative interrogation than it gets here.
Comely’s obsessive war on migrants includes sadistically emptying water bottles left in the desert to help them survive risky illegal crossings. She and her colleagues call their targets “toncs”, a slang term apparently derived from the acronym Temporarily Outside Native Country, but they use it more like a dehumanising racial slur. One day she goes too far, fatally shooting an already injured Mexican in a trigger-happy showdown that falls somewhere between tragic mistake and cold-blooded murder. The killing brings her into conflict with her bosses and with Jose Edwards (Mike Wilson), a kindly elder of the Native American Tohono O’odham nation, whose territory has straddled Arizona and Mexico for centuries, long before white settlers imposed an artificial border. A legal investigation follows but, inevitably, the scales of justice are not equally weighted in this modern-day Cowboys-vs-Indians saga.
Shot with a dusty, sun-bleached, understated indie-movie look, The Wall is more of a one woman show than a fully flesh-out ensemble drama. The only star name in a mostly unknown cast, Krieps is undoubtedly a casting coup for Van Leeuw. With her severely scraped back hair, zero make-up and Elvis-curled lip sneer, the Luxemboug native’s striking physical transformation into a perma-scowling androgynous warrior queen is impressive. Even so, whatever her acting prowess, Krieps is still an inescapably bizarre choice for such a butch, ball-breaking, gun-toting character. Speaking at his first El Gouna festival screening, Van Leeuw revealed the star was cast as a condition of the film’s Luxembourgish funding, which makes more financial than creative sense.
Also, despite intensive accent coaching, Krieps cannot entirely hide her natural Euro-inflected pronunciation. If Van Leeuw had made Comely a recent immigrant herself, these transatlantic slippages might have been more dramatically plausible, and lent her racist outlook extra ironic bite. But no, the simplistic screenplay presents her as American born and bred, repeatedly bashing us over the head with her God-fearing nativist pride. There is rich potential for a complex study in evil here, but too little depth, context or nuance. However well-intentioned, The Wall only shows us a monster, not the forces that made her so monstrous.
Director, screenwriter: Philippe Van Leeuw
Cast: Vicky Krieps, Mike Wilson, Ezeikel Velasco, Haydn Winston, Marla Robison, Steve Anderson, Brendan Guy Murphy
Cinematography: Joachim Philippe
Editing: Gladys Joujou
Producer: Guillaume Malandrin
Production company: Altitude 100 Production (Belgium)
World sales: Indie Sales, France
Venue: El Gouna Film Festival (Feature Narrative Competition)
In English, Spanish
96 minutes
