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“Southern Comfort” is a great film, although it suffers from being a bit too predictable. I suspect part of the predictability is by design. The movie takes place in Cajun country Louisiana during 1973, and it follows a National Guard unit which gets lost in the bayous and automatically becomes a representation of America’s Vietnam War.
The movie has a straightforward approach, and its symbols are directly at the surface. The moment we realize that the guardsmen shot their rifles with blanks, we already know that they will be hopelessly trying to survive in an unfamiliar land. There is also the part where the weekend soldiers are actively hunted down and slaughtered by Cajun locals (who know the bayou like the back of their hand) and we consider the futility of American power against the Viet Cong.
The guardsmen are obviously out of place, and they make critical mistakes right from the very beginning. They cut a Cajun fisherman’s nets, they “borrow” three Cajun boats from locals and they shoot blank machine guns at the Cajuns. The Cajuns do not find this funny.
By the film’s end, the guardsmen will have been shot dead, stabbed, hung, buried alive, and mauled by wild dogs. And at the same time, while they try to discipline themselves in a parody of samurai or military order, they are floundering in circles while helicopters are unsuccessfully trying to rescue them. All the action is spectacularly shown in “Southern Comfort.” The film represents the bayous as a region of beautiful peril, where multicolored greens, yellows, and browns glitter in the sun while odd colorful birds chirp at each other and the Cajuns quietly stalk next to trees while the soldiers meander aimlessly around that absurd clown show which is made out of them. “Southern Comfort” is a film bursting with taut professionalism.
Unfortunately, though, it is this devotion to its metaphoric purpose that makes the film lacking as a drama about real human beings, which is always a great pity in its director, the gifted young man whose other achievements are “The Warriors,” “The Driver,” and “The Long Riders”, I suspect. He appears to have mastered the art of making a film visually stunning, energetic and stylish, but like many gifted filmmakers, they seem to lack the focus on the deep humanity of their characters.
In order to masks the shortcomings of his characters, he simplifies them into overly exaggerated stick figures that symbolize everything except their true identity. This was taken to the extreme in “The Driver,” a thriller where the characters The Driver and The Girl were utterly stripped of having any real names or depth. This was also Hill’s style in “The Warriors” which portrayed the New York gangs as Greek mythology. That approach bothered me so much in “The Warriors” that I ignored, I suspect now, some of the true merits of that picture. It irritates me again in “Southern Comfort.”
What about these men? Of the Cajuns we learn nothing: They are invisible assassins. Of the guardsmen, however, we learn little more. One is swollen with authority. One intends to look out for himself. One is weak, one is strong, and only the man played by Keith Carradine seems somewhat balanced and sane. Once we get the psychological labels straight, there are no further surprises. With regard to reality there are very few variables other than these. When all is said and done this film follows a group of guardsmen traversing through the bayous, slowly getting picked off one by one, which makes the only question left whether any of them will survive.
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