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Rust Didn’t Choose to Echo Its Tragedy, But It Courses Through the Film
The finished movie is an appropriately unvarnished western, starring a lead actor visibly shaken by his experience making it.
Camerimage has celebrated cinematographers for 30-plus years — among the thousands of times I’ve seen movies in theaters, the only applause for DPs, camera operators, or second-unit members (with crickets for writer, director, stars) occurs here — and constitutes a kind of annual hajj for the world’s greatest technician-artists and newcomers alike. Żydowicz and fellow director Kazimierz Suwała then delivered statements calmly but with a certain polemicism: While “a lot of things have happened” since announcing Rust ’s inclusion, they expressed hope we would “see [they] made the right decision,” and further that we watch only as witnesses of a film, not any tragedy or extended legal proceedings — “no other reasons are of importance.” The shock comes after some narrative table-setting, but it’s clear from the first two shots — a match cut between extreme, Leone-esque close-ups of Baldwin and newcomer Patrick Scott McDermott’s eyes — that Rust is, in some qualitative sense, a real film not kin with the Randal Emmett factory giving aging stars a comfy paycheck off the back of horrid material.
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