FrightFest review – Lâif a Séil (The Last Ashes)

Lâif a Séil (The Last Ashes)

It’s easy to characterise Lâif a Séil as a European-set Western – its heroine learns her fearsome avenging skills after being sold to the Ojibway Indians – but it’s also a type of melodrama which was well established before the Western got going, and indeed was a major influence on the cowboy genre.  The villains are the Graff clan, who are something between feudal throwbacks and savage outlaws like the Doones of Lorna Doone, and tattooed Hélène (Sophie Mousel), who returns to the Graff castle in Luxembourg after escaping an atrocious childhood as a girl raised as a brood-mare, having acquired the sort of skills, resources and strength to fit her iron will (and a big black horse) after the manner of Heathcliff or the Count of Monte Cristo.

In the black and white academy frame pre-credits sequence – all forty minutes of it – we’re in 1835 and Luxembourg is under Dutch occupation, allowing the brutal Graff (Jules Werner) to gain power over a community dependent on his grinding mill for food.  Young Hélène, who is only allowed to take off her bark mask after reaching the age of puberty, realises her likely fate and looks for a way out, which she finds thanks to Graff’s youngest, most sympathetic son (who pays a price for helping her).  Left to die on a gibbet like Harmonica’s brother in Once Upon a Time in the West, Hélène escapes – returning after the opening title and a widescreen colour country fifteen years later, with the Dutch gone and the national army in the area building a railroad that will lessen Graff’s grip on the people.  Skirmishes are inevitable, and like most cattle barons Graff has three contrasting sons … thuggish firsborn Pier (Luc Schiltz), mean number two Luc (Philippe Thelen) and now-crippled, abused, shoved-into-a-cassock-and-clerical-orders Jon (Timo Wagner).

We get a sense of how twisted religion – the Bible verses we here are edited or altered to justify the way things are in the castle – has warped this community, turning women into chattels and subjugating everything to the will of the ailing, near-insane patriarch and his feebler sons.  Avenger Hélène arrives, now calling herself Oona, and starts her Man With No Name campaign of destroying the Graffs, with her identity let slip only to a few women – Marie (Marie Jung) and Sidonie (Jeanne Warner) – as she slips out of her cell to pick off key minions like the rotten priest Meyers (Jean-Paul Maes), who suffers a partcularly nasty fate and works her personal plan even as the tides of history and Graff’s own ill-health threaten to bring down her enemies before she can.  At one point, Graff admits he raped Hélène’s mother – so she might even be a Graff, hinting at a weakness in the blood which explains why male Graff grandchildren die shortly after birth, though other explanations (a curse) are on the table.

Directed by Loïc Tanson, who also co-wrote with Frederic Zeimet, this is a long, slightly slow epic which keeps promising genre satisfactions – who doesn’t like seeing horrible barons brought low? – but diverting its attentions elsewhere (it’s less of a crowd-pleaser than the comparable Danish Bastarden/The Promised Land).  Tanson often frames agonised faces – usually Wagner’s – in the middle of gloomy frames as terrible events are revealed in speeches.  It has a lot of thematic meat, and you might be driven to look up the 19^th century history of Luxembourg to get more of the background.