Italian-born director Roberto Minervini’s latest feature follows a battalion of Union Army soldiers scouting the West and trying to stay alive.
Nonprofessional actors play themselves, or versions of themselves, in narratives that seem to have been crafted out of their own lives. And while the locations are always real places, with an emphasis on swaths of the American South — as his name suggests, Minervini is Italian, but he’s lived in the U.S. since 2000 — the director transforms them into sublime backdrops for his gritty tales of poverty and abandon.
“Real” in the sense that there’s not much action except for one long and deadly battle sequence, while the rest of the film mostly entails soldiers sitting around and killing time, which is what often happens in war. And real in that the cast consists of average men who look the part, especially dressed in those dark blue Union uniforms, but talk more or less like men talk today.
Who, exactly, is attacking the Union Army is never made clear, and Minervini seems less concerned with historical details than with capturing a certain state of loss and confusion among the troops.
But as the title states, these soldiers may be damned from the get-go. When we cut back to the original camp at some point, there are only dead bodies left on the ground, in images reminiscent of Matthew Brady’s stunning photographs of Civil War battlefields. Minervini leaves us feeling that, although the Union did of course win the war, their victory would lead America back to where it is now, on the brink of another major schism. As Faulkner famously wrote: “The past is never dead.
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