Edinburgh Film Festival 2013
I would have thought the fun part of the gold rush was the panning for gold. If I was making a film that would be the bit that seems most exciting to focus on. But I’d be wrong. There’s very little panning for gold in Gold. Instead Thomas Arslan lets us tag along with a group of prospectors heading overland to Klondike.
Not the gang of grizzled men that you might expect, these pioneers are a diverse group, including a single woman, who have answered a newspaper advert and paid what looks like a considerable amount of money to be shown the route. They are all Germans who have come from the homeland and are trying to find a better life. But their backstories do not interest the director. Where he looks for drama is in the interactions between the group members as they travel north through Canada.
Gold gives a good impression of just how pioneering the original pioneers had to be. I find a two mile walk through a forest more than enough, and that’s with a well-marked path and a guaranteed ice-cream at the end. I’m impressed by the spirit that is unfazed when told it is four hundred miles to the next town and it’s unexplored forest all the way.
Scripted in two languages, the pioneers speak German to each other and English in the towns that have sprung up along the route. Gold shows the deprivations they suffered en route. It’s giving nothing away to say that it wasn’t like setting the sat-nav to Klondike and turning on the cruise control. Camping in a new place every night, dealing with maps that basically need you to fill them in as you go. Shot with big views that look great in widescreen, the landscape is a vital part of the piece. Like many these people are not at one with nature, they are simply trying to overcome it.
Gold simplifies what must have been complex interactions with native Americans. The first group they meet – at a very handy moment – even speak English. There must have been many people who just set off in the wrong direction and were never seen again – no one ever seems to consult a compass. In those days there was no calling the AA when your transport broke down. Instead you shot it. They must have been very keen on gold to take the risks that they did and apart from well it’s gold isn’t it, there isn’t much analysis of the travellers’ motives.
Gold finds excitement and tension in the hellish journey just to get to the gold fields. The failures, the people who don’t make it are rarely given so much screen time. Human nature hasn’t changed much since 1898.
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