[CINÉMA] Last Stop: Yuma County, a charming neo-western heir to the Coen brothers

We are in the 1970s, under the Sun of Arizona. Light and heat strike the desert expanses of Yuma County. There, isolated from everything, there is a motel and a diner who live thanks to rare passing customers. Among them, a representative in Japanese cutlery patiently awaits the tanker truck supposed to supply the fuel pump to be able to continue its path. He then sees a Ford window at the window Pinto green who parks in front of the restaurant; The same car model that served the same morning for a bank robbery, in the neighboring town of Buckeye. The two thugs, he heard on the radio, would have fled with seven hundred thousand dollars. Suddenly, two men leave the vehicle and enter the diner…

An atypical setting …

First feature film directed by Francis Galluppi, Last Stop : Yuma County was born from chance. The young filmmaker, expected since to make an upcoming opus of the horrific saga Evil Deadfell one day on a diner de Lancaster, in the County of Los Angeles, and after having machine -gunned it in photos, was inspired to the point of writing a scenario for this place: “In this casehe says in the press kit, I first found the place before imagining the intrigue. »»

The result is a rather charming mixture of neo-western (evoking Bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia, No Country for Old Men or the recent Cry Macho) and film Noir – The filmmaker strongly claims the inspiration of Don Siegel and Alfred Hitchcock.

… but an impersonal story

In truth, the black humor and the underlying irony of the story would rather send us back to the quirky cinema of the Coen brothers. Influences in too crushing, as the filmmaker is limited to reproducing school, as an overexcited young film buff, archetypal situations and figures without really giving himself the trouble to bring a personal touch to the whole. The story of this modern day western is nonetheless sympathetic and pleasant to follow, although its narrative evolution turns out to be sadly predictable.

More annoying, perhaps, is the change of direction operated at two thirds of the film, passing from the closed doors to a run without much interest; The characters to which we had hitherto attached ourselves having been eliminated in two stages three movements.

We still retain for this first film an atypical frame, sublimated by storyboarded plans with the most successful calibration, and a skewer of perfectly matched actors (Jim Cummings, Jocelin Donahue and Richard Brake).

3 out of 5 stars