In his lead role as Strindler, a clever reimagining of Pavel Chichikov in Gogol's classic, Cox takes on what made the original character unforgettable, an undeniable charm of a cadaverous drifter with a special ability to reinvent and represent himself. We can't quite place him or define him, but that is precisely the game, not knowing if he plays more as a government official or an itinerant preacher, all with the same, unsettling objective: harvesting lists of dead Mexican laborers in exchange for impressive sums of money from landowners. His very shady plan involves, through evident racism and exploitation, to supply the government with evidence of Mexican laborers being kept out of the territory, merely the premise in this probing and reflexive entry.

Cox's anti-Right-wing statement works as an ideal closing to his career, a final step in a vibrant, career-long engagement with the Western.

'Dead Souls' review—West & Wild Observations: The Cox and the Dead. (3.5/5)

By Bill Arceneaux | Moviegoing Rocks | 07 Feb 2026

The grand and proto-independent filmmaker Alex Cox, whose movies often combine anachronisms with confusion and contradiction, has humbly presented what he states as his "last movie," Dead Souls. To what degree this is his last, I'm uncertain. A wink-wink of a tagline? An honest finale to a cooky career? Settled out in begotten parts of wild west-era Arizona, Cox is seated in both the director's chair and the body of the lead role, and, I feel, exists in the third role of a spectating spectre. A final outing for a wild spirit?

A mysterious collector of the dead names of Mexican laborers, Cox plays the newly arrived stranger in town, Strindler, who pays for his immigrant corpse listings with gold coins. Strindler masquerades with differing origins, from businessman to government agent to reverend, covering his tracks and trails in pursuit of these specific names. For someone seeking accuracy, he assumes ambiguity.

Crisp and clean cinematography overrides the dust and dirt of the West in a manner that alludes to both his present capabilities and past romances with genre-bending filmmaking. As the movie unfolds, a potentially biographical portrait of the director himself forms, or at least a memoir to which he has included cherry-picked selections from his life. All at once, Alex Cox's Strindler is written and performed not unlike a soulful vision of one's own existence, leaning through a nexus of time and place, trolling all the way to further escapades beyond this plane of living.

That's a mouthful.

Much in the mold of a mid-chapter William Burroughs book break, Dead Souls makes sense through nonsensical vagueness. It's a mystery through and through, but one that is made of answers and clarity. Each encounter rings of a past movie catalogue of familiar faces and themes, with contemporary meaning. There's not much difference in attitude or action between the late 1800s and the mid 2020s, as everything has been and likely will always be commodified and for sale.

Dead Souls is a dream of now. Sometimes too odd, sometimes too open to interpretation, but never without a cloudiness, slowly moving over pastures and people. A transfixing watch, timed to the tune of a pop-out bird clock.

Could this be Cox's final film? It's a sleight of mischief if so, perfectly articulated in ambiguity and the unnatural order of things. Such is to be expected from a playful patron of the pictures.

Alex Cox's 'Dead Souls': A Wild Ride Through the American Wasteland

nishadil.com, 2/2/2026

You know, there are directors whose very name conjures a specific kind of cinematic mischief, and Alex Cox is absolutely one of them. For decades, he's been that wonderfully uncompromised voice, always ready to poke the establishment with a sharp, satirical stick. So, when word got out about his latest, "Dead Souls," billed as a "Gogol Western," well, my ears certainly perked up. And let me tell you, it delivers on the bizarre, brilliant promise of that title and then some.

It's an idea that's frankly quite breathtaking in its audacity: taking Nikolai Gogol's masterful, scathing 19th-century satire of Russian corruption, Dead Souls, and transplanting its darkly comic heart right into the sun-baked, dusty plains of a very modern American West. We follow Chichikov, our intrepid, if morally bankrupt, protagonist—brilliantly embodied, I might add—as he meanders through a landscape utterly devoid of moral compass. His mission, as in the novel, is to acquire the "dead souls"—names of deceased serfs still registered as living, thus possessing a bizarre, albeit fleeting, value. But here, the serfs are, perhaps, the casualties of a different kind of economic and political blight.

But make no mistake, this isn't merely an academic exercise in literary adaptation. Oh no. Cox, ever the provocateur, has infused Dead Souls with a searing, unmistakable contemporary urgency. The 'dead souls' Chichikov collects become a stark metaphor, a damning indictment, if you will, of a nation seemingly willing to trade its very principles for transient gain. It's hard, honestly, to watch the sheer avarice and moral decay depicted on screen and not draw immediate, rather uncomfortable parallels to the recent political upheavals we've witnessed—particularly the unsettling, divisive era of the Trump presidency. It feels like a direct, furious response, filtered through a darkly comic lens.

Visually, it's just so Cox. You get that signature blend of gritty realism and almost surreal, dreamlike sequences, all bathed in a palette that shifts from sun-drenched desolation to shadowy, claustrophobic interiors. The dialogue, too, has that wonderfully clipped, slightly off-kilter rhythm we've come to love from him. It's a true genre mashup—not just Western and satire, but with hints of existential road movie, even a touch of B-movie grindhouse charm, all held together by a surprisingly coherent, albeit wonderfully weird, vision.

The ensemble cast, a mix of Cox regulars and fresh faces, absolutely leans into the material's eccentricities, giving performances that are both understated and brilliantly theatrical. You find yourself both repulsed and morbidly fascinated by these characters, each a microcosm of the larger societal rot Cox is so keenly observing. Is it perfect? Probably not; Cox's films rarely are in a conventional sense. Sometimes, the sheer weight of its ambition threatens to buckle under, or a scene might linger a touch too long. But these are minor quibbles, honestly. The sheer courage of its vision, the unapologetic clarity of its message, and its utterly unique voice make it a film that simply demands your attention.

Ultimately, "Dead Souls" is vintage Alex Cox: confrontational, intelligent, often hilarious, and always, always on its own terms. It's a vital, urgent piece of political cinema, a mirror held up to a nation wrestling with its own soul (or lack thereof). If you're yearning for a film that doesn't just entertain but truly makes you think, perhaps even squirm a little, then saddle up. This one's a must-see.

Dead Souls review—Alex Cox rides into sunset with anti-Trump spaghetti western

Rotterdam film festival: The Repo Man director relocates Gogol's surreal novella to the old west in what he says will be his final film

by Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian, 02/01/2026

English film-maker Alex Cox comes riding into town with this jauntily odd and surreal western which he has indicated will be his swansong, shot on the rugged plains of Almeria in Spain and also Arizona. Cox himself is the star—an elegant, dapper presence—and his co-writer is veteran spaghetti western actor Gianni Garko.

The story has obvious relevance to contemporary America, and a flash-forward makes some of this clear. But it is also inspired by the classic novella of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, a mysterious parable of greed and vanity about a man who travels around offering to buy the souls of dead serfs on various estates in pre-revolutionary Russia so landowners can lower their tax bills, but plans to claim that they are still alive and therefore pass himself off as a wealthy man.

Cox transplants some of this tale to the American old west of the late 19th century. He plays Strindler, a spindly and cadaverous fellow with elaborate courtly manners, a fastidious suit and bowler hat. Strindler sometimes claims to be a government official and sometimes an itinerant preacher. Having checked in at a fly-blown hotel, he exerts himself to make the acquaintance of the local notables, including the sheriff and mayor, to whom he sycophantically loses at cards.

Strindler has a proposition to make: he will pay bafflingly large amounts of money for lists of dead Mexicans who have died on their land or in their employ. This exploitative and racist world being what it is, there are an awful lot of Mexican names to be "farmed" in this way, and it is Strindler's sinister plan to sell them on to government departments who want evidence that undesirable aliens are being excluded from American territory. But in another, stranger sense, Strindler is offering a kind of cleansing or redemption: he will take these dead people off their hands.

Strindler is a kind of proto-ICE drifter, although with a distinctive, quaint kind of innocence, and for all that he is a crook through and through, Cox shows that Strindler is outranked in crookedness by pretty much everyone he meets. He is out of his depth, and never more so when challenged to a gunfight: a duel that ends in bloody chaos, after which the recording authorities take the view that one should print the legend and not the truth.

Dead Souls has a distinctive indie-budget look, of which Cox makes a virtue by presenting the action almost as a theatrical chamber piece. Bizarre and fruity characters pop up on the parched landscape. Dead men will raise themselves and start singing. Sometimes Strindler will dream he has been catapulted into an American future during a third world war in which his services are needed to buy the names of dead Russians, Chinese and Peruvians.

It is a diverting and watchable love letter to the spaghetti west of the movies, and a satirical thorn in the flesh of Trumpian politics.

VERDICT: Cult indie director Alex Cox gives Gogol's classic satirical novel a Wild West makeover in this uneven but enjoyably bizarre love letter to the spaghetti western genre.

Stephen Dalton
January 29th, 2026

The first feature in almost a decade from maverick British writer-director Alex Cox, Dead Souls is a loose adaptation of the classic absurdist novel of the same name by Ukrainian author Nikolai Gogol, relocating the story's 19th century Russian hinterland to the lawless desert vistas of the Wild West. Originally published in unfinished form in 1842, Gogol's bitingly dark comic fable has since inspired multiple stage, screen, opera and radio versions. Cox retains the story's macabre humour and surreal undertow, but his satirical six-shooters are mostly aimed at the ingrained racism that underpins American society, both past and present, an evergreen theme which feels particularly timely in the current political climate. Making its Dutch festival debut in Rotterdam, this is an uneven but enjoyably quirky labour of love from an admirably uncompromising indie auteur.

Though best known for the pulpy sci-fi cult classic Repo Man (1984) and the junkie-punk biopic Sid & Nancy (1986), Cox has spent most of his latter career in the indie margins making low-budget variations on the western genre, riffing on stylistic tropes laid down by Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Corbucci and others. One of his later "microfeatures" was the archly titled Searchers 2.0 (2007), in homage to John Ford's The Searchers (1956). In 2009 he published a book on spaghetti westerns, 10,000 Ways to Die. On Dead Souls, he even shares writing credits with Gianni Garko, a veteran Italian actor with numerous cowboy B-movie credits.

On first impressions, Cox has made his most overtly traditional western yet in Dead Souls. He initially sticks to period authenticity and naturalistic performances, though he later digresses into formal trickery with pleasingly unpredictable, surreal results. Shot in the desert landscapes of Arizona and Almeria in Spain, the film has a handsome widescreen look. Played by Cox himself, Gogol's anti-hero Chichikov is here renamed Strindler, a saturnine high plains drifter in a wide-brimmed hat who wanders frontier towns gathering the names of recently deceased Mexican workers as part of a shadowy scheme to scam money from a government census. An angel of death posing as a preacher, his picaresque journey involves gunfights, drunken brawls and shady deals with haughty landowners, crooked sheriffs and racist immigration officials. Everyone here is on the make, sensing a fistful of dollars behind Strindler's slippery mask of righteous piety.

Cox initially plays Dead Souls with a straight face, but he begins to deconstruct the narrative midway through with post-modern games, meta twists and audience-winking allusions to his previous films. During an unexpected musical interlude, a singing corpse joins the cast to perform "The Streets of Laredo", a country-folk murder ballad previously recorded by Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Joan Baez and others. A brief, bizarre flashback to Strindler's childhood features Tim Burton-style stop-motion animation and a cryptic nod to the novel's Russian-language roots. Most strikingly, a feverish dream sequence becomes a doomy prophecy of America's current incarnation as a military-industrial surveillance state of AI, cryptocurrency and extreme inequality. These broad-brush political statements are hardly subtle but they feel uncomfortably necessary in the Trump era.

Having played only minor cameos in his previous films, Cox brings an engagingly deadpan comic energy to his first starring role as Strindler. A gnarly and impish figure on screen, he underplays the absurd humour and pulls off a fairly credible American accent. The rest of the performances vary in quality, though Levee Duplay stands out as a nakedly corrupt prosecutor. A background chorus of long-time Cox regulars including Dick Rude, Zander Schloss and veteran English punk musician Edward Tudor-Pole also feature in the colourful ensemble cast. The retro-styled animated credits and Dan Wool's lyrical score feel like further homages to Leone, Morricone, Corbucci and the golden age of spaghetti westerns.

Juggling slapstick humour, political critique, trigger-happy action and surreal tangents, Dead Souls does not always hang together comfortably. Cox has made better films, but this offbeat frontier fable is still a charmingly eccentric, mischievous late-career effort with an impressively strong authorial voice. Now 71, the director has strongly hinted this may be his final feature. If so, he is not quite going out in a blaze of glory, but with his principles intact, proudly reaffirming his indie-movie outlaw credentials to the end.

Director: Alex Cox
Screenwriters: Alex Cox, Gianni Garko
Cast: Alex Cox, Zander Schloss, Dick Rude, Levee Duplay, Amariah Dionne, Brendan Guy Murphy, Sarah Vista, Jesse Lee Pacheco, Edward Tudor-Pole
Cinematography: Chance Falker, Ignacio Aguilar
Editing: Merritt Crocker
Production design: Melissa Woods, Leonardo Giménez
Composer: Dan Wool
Producers: Merritt Crocker, Guillermo de Oliveira
Production companies: Exterminating Angel (US), Zapruder Films (US)
World Sales: Exterminating Angel
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Harbour)
In English
88 minutes

Once Upon a Time in the West by Alex Cox: 'Sid & Nancy' director returns to the screen after a long hiatus, turning Gogol's prose into a western, a genre proscribed by political correctness that is now revived at festivals One of the hottest—and most allegorical—leads raising the temperature and pressure of the 29th São Paulo Film Festival over the weekend galloping in a western with Alex Cox's authorial brand, "Dead Souls", which has a new screening this Saturday (25th), at 4:10 pm, at Cine Segall. Those who grew up watching "Repo Man—The Punk Wave" (1984) on "Tela Quente" will be delighted with the reunion with its director, who has been missing since 2017. Cox is an indie auteur from Bebington, England, acclaimed for the cult film "Sid & Nancy" (1986). He directs and stars in this shoot-em-up that today shines on screens in São Paulo, set in 1890—the year of the U.S. census—when chaos erupts through the prairies amid the arrival of a stranger, who is called only Strindler. Played by the filmmaker, the guy, who will later be recognized as a reverend, arrives in a small town in Arizona and negotiates money in exchange for the names of dead Mexican workers, in an allusion to President Donald Trump's bellicosity with immigrants. The plot, based on the prose of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), arrived in Brazil with its passport stamped by the Almería Western Film Festival, held in Spain. The production took place in the city that served as the location for several classics of the spaghetti western, the Italian westerns of the 1960s and 70s that reproduced in Europe the American outposts of the nineteenth century. This year, in addition to Cox, his list of competitors included "Sirât", by Oliver Laxe, which opened the São Paulo Film Festival on the 15th. The Almería Festival is a rare bird in cinephile culture. In fact, it is difficult to see westerns in movie theaters nowadays, when only streaming gives a damn to the lode, which is the target of the armies of political correctness. The Cannes Film Festival, in 2023, gave space to "Strange Way of Life", by Pedro Almodóvar (now on MUBI), which revisits the environment of duels in the sun under a queer lens. On the other hand, "Heads or Tails?" ("Test the Croce"), with John C. Relly, shone in August at the Locarno exhibitions, in Switzerland, and illuminated the Rio Festival, two weeks ago, by evoking the figure of Buffalo Bill, or rather William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), a hunter, pickpocket and railroad driver who became a legend from the itinerant cavalry and shooting show called Wild West Show. "Dead Souls" will be screened at the São Paulo Film Festival again on the 28th, at 10:05 pm, at Cinesesc.

"Era uma vez no Oeste de Alex Cox, Diretor de 'Sid & Nancy' volta às telas, após um longo hiato, transformando a prosa de Gogol num faroeste, gênero proscrito pela correção política que hoje revive em festivais. Por: Rodrigo Fonseca—Especial para o Correio da Manhã (21 de outubro de 2025—00:01)

Chumbo dos mais quentes—e dos mais alegó ricos—elevou a temperatura e a pressão da 29– Mostra de São Paulo no fim de semana a galope num faroeste com a grife autoral de Alex Cox, "Almas Mortas" ("Dead Souls"), que ganha nova sessão neste sábado (dia 25), às 16h10, no Cine Segall. Quem cresceu vendo "Repo Man—A Onda Punk" (1984) na "Tela Quente" vai se deliciar com o reencontro com seu diretor, sumido desde 2017. Cox é uma grife indie egressa de Bebington, na Inglaterra, aclamado pelo cult "Sid & Nancy" (1986). Ele dirige e estrela o bangue-bangue que hoje brilha em telas paulistas, ambientado 1890—ano do censo dos EUA—, quando o caos irrompe pelas pradarias em meio à chegada de um estranho, que se chama apenas Strindler. Interpretado pelo cineasta, o sujeito, que mais tarde vai ser reconhecido como reverendo, chega a uma pequena cidade do Arizona e negocia dinheiro em troca de nomes de trabalhadores mexicanos mortos, numa alusão à belicosidade do presidente Donald Trump com imigrantes. A trama, baseada na prosa de Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), chegou ao Brasil com o passaporte carimbado pelo Almería Western Film Festival, realizado na Espanha.

Esse evento ocorre na cidade que serviu de locação para vá rios clássicos do western spaghetti, os faroestes italianos dos anos 1960 e 70 que reproduziam na Europa as paragens americanas do século XIX. Há nessa maratona ibérica uma competição de bangue-bangues feitos nos dias de hoje. Este ano, além de Cox, seu rol de competidores contou com "Sirât", de Oliver Laxe, que abriu a Mostra de SP no dia 15.

O Festival de Almería é uma ave rara na cultura cinéfila. Aliás, é difícil ver westerns em salas de cinema hoje em dia, quando só streaming dâo bola para o filão, que é alvo do patrulhamento da correção política. O Festival de Cannes, em 2023, deu espaço para "Strange Way of Life", de Pedro Almodóvar (hoje na MUBI), que revisita o ambiente de duelos ao sol sob a lente queer. Já "Cara ou Coroa?" ("Testa o Croce"), com John C. Relly, brilhou em agosto nas mostras de Locarno, na Suíça, e iluminou o Festival do Rio, há duas semanas, ao evocar a figura de Buffalo Bill, ou melhor William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), um caçador, batedor de carteiras e condutor ferroviário que virou lenda a partir do espetáculo itinerante de cavalaria e de tiro chamado Wild West Show.

"Almas Mortas" passa na Mostra de SP novamente no dia 28, às 22h05, no Cinesesc.

'Dead Souls' Film Review (Westerns, All'Italiana!, Sunday, 10/26/2025)

49th São Paulo International Film Festival Review: Alex Cox's Dead Souls is a revelation. It arrives from the dust like a forgotten gospel of guilt and survival, reviving the western as both myth and moral reckoning. Sparse, deliberate, and unnervingly human, it proves that restraint can be far more powerful than spectacle.

Cox stars as Strindler, a drifter who trades in the identities of the dead, moving through a border town where the line between commerce and conscience no longer exists. His performance is weary, magnetic, and steeped in dark humor. The film's world feels suspended between the sacred and the corrupt, where every deal sounds like a prayer for redemption.

Opposite him, newcomer Levee Duplay delivers an outstanding turn as Prosecutor Vistov, the town's quiet executioner of justice. Duplay is an excellent choice for the role, bringing just the right menace and control. His calm presence tightens every scene and gives Cox's restless energy something sharp to push against. It is a performance that completes the film rather than competes with it.

Cinematography captures the land in tones of gold and ash, where the light feels almost alive. The score hums low and sorrowful, like wind through a church window. Together they create an atmosphere that is both intimate and apocalyptic.

Dead Souls feels built from instinct and memory, a handmade vision of ruin and grace. It is a film that trusts silence, movement, and the faces of its actors more than words. By the final shot, when the desert swallows the last trace of human noise, the effect is staggering.

Verdict: A masterful return from Alex Cox and a powerful debut for Levee Duplay. Tense, poetic, and unforgettable.

#CRíTICA Henrique Artuni | Alex Cox americaniza Gógol na comédia faroeste 'Almas Mortas'. Diretor de 'Repo Man' faz filme com orçamento ínfimo; adaptação de romance russo alfineta violência nos EUA.https://t.co/cKaF0uo4Nw — Folha de S.Paulo (@folha) October 16, 2025

"Almas Mortas" **** (four stars), by Henrique Artuni

Quando Sex. (17), às 19h10, no IMS Paulista; dom. (19), s 15h55, no Espaço Petrobras; sáb. (25), às 16h10, no Cine Segall; ter. (28), às 22h05, no Cinsesc
Classificação 16 anos
Elenco Alex Cox, Zander Schloss, Dick Rude
Produção Espanha, EUA, 2025
Direção Alex Cox
Link: https://mostra.org/filmes/almas-mortas

Terno preto, chapéu-coco, alto, magro, desengonçado. Um homem caminha sozinho por uma pradaria do Arizona, próximo à fronteira dos Estados Unidos com o México. Ele se detém num pequeno cemitério de nomes hispânicos em cruzes de madeira e abre um caderno grosso. Estaria orando para remir aqueles pobres coitados?

O caderno grosso não é uma Bíblia, como saberemos, mas um registro de centenas de mexicanos, suas datas de nascimento e óbito, bem como a causa da morte. Que pode alguém querer com uma lista dessas?

Questão capital para tempos como hoje, em que a morte é tão ou mais banal e comercial do que quando Nikolai Gógol escreveu seu "Almas Mortas", e que ainda desperta respostas ácidas, como a dessa adaptação de Alex Cox.

Com sessões na Mostra de Cinema de São Paulo, o longa dirigido e protagonizado por Cox americaniza o romance num faroeste cômico, mas pode surpreender o espectador desavisado pelas tintas de guerrilha e amadorismo—locações simples e artificiais, elenco anônimo, pós-produção barata—, que dão tanto um tom naif quanto reforçam seu lado sardônico.

Não é demérito para o septuagenário cineasta e ator britânico, celebrizado pela indústria em 1984 pelo punk "Repo Man", e ostracizado poucos anos depois após o fracasso comercial de "Walker".

De lá para cá, habituou-se a orçamentos cada vez menores—para este "Almas Mortas", que Cox apelida de seu último filme, ele apelou para o financiamento coletivo, somando US$ 215 mil para a produção, uma esmola para os padrões hollywoodianos.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION: Black suit, bowler hat, tall, thin, and gangly. A man walks alone across an Arizona prairie, near the border of the United States and Mexico. He stops at a small cemetery of Hispanic names on wooden crosses and opens a thick notebook. Could he be praying for the redemption of those poor souls? The thick notebook isn't a Bible, as we'll know, but a record of hundreds of Mexicans, their dates of birth and death, as well as the cause of death. What could anyone want with a list like that? A crucial question for times like today, when death is as banal and commercial as it was when Nikolai Gogol wrote "Dead Souls," and which still elicits harsh responses, such as this adaptation by Alex Cox. Showing at the São Paulo Film Festival, the film directed by and starring Cox Americanizes the novel into a comedic Western, but may surprise the unsuspecting viewer with its overtones of guerrilla warfare and amateurism—simple and artificial locations, an anonymous cast, cheap post-production—which both give it a naive tone and reinforce its sardonic side. This is no discredit to the septuagenarian British filmmaker and actor, made famous by the industry in 1984 with the punk hit "Repo Man" and ostracized a few years later after the commercial failure of "Walker." Since then, he's become accustomed to ever-smaller budgets—for this "Dead Souls," which Cox calls his final film, he turned to crowdfunding, bringing in $215,000 for the production, a pittance by Hollywood standards. With very little money, Cox makes straightforward cinema, but one that knows how to play with expectations and genres dear to American entertainment—the Western, the musical, physical comedy, and even animation. His character, the mysterious Strindler, arrives in a small town in 1890—the year of the US census—willing to pay small fortunes for the names of dead Mexican workers. By inventing lies, he arouses the affection, distrust, and greed of the powerful locals who can help him. To the mayor and the sheriff, he presents himself as a government official. To the doctor, as a mortician. At a farmer's house, he pretends to be a pastor willing to save those Catholic souls. There are also people like a mine owner, who only speaks the language of money. It's a shrewd translation of the original book, in which the speculator Chitchikov travels through the Russian provinces buying the names of dead muzhiks at a time when serfdom was still the law of the empire. Without spoiling the film's conclusion, suffice it to say that Cox will create an ironic connection with the current American war and immigration departments, poking at the violence rooted in economic progress—not just against Mexicans, of course. From Gogol, the director also borrows his caricatured humor, reflected here in scenes involving characters like a drunken coachman, a tough gunfighter, or a Mexican matador. But it's Cox's own charisma and appearance with faces and mouths adorned by a slicked-back quiff—that lends Strindler a clownish quality, stealing the show trying to escape from trouble. Not all of them work or are truly funny. The attention to landscapes, another characteristic of Gogol that Cox addresses when recording the protagonist's journeys between one negotiation and another, are perhaps the least inspired parts of the whole, along with the pacing of the film's final third—clumsy when it comes to tying up its loose ends, but which makes up for it in the final catharsis. Finally, the controversy over Gogol's nationality, now claimed by Ukrainians, is symbolic. How many souls are not counted or not counted every day in this conflict, where one side seeks supposed ancient glory? Through the farce of cinema, on the margins, Cox seems to be hinting at present and future wars, in which the United States is an angel of death. ****

Com muito pouco, Cox faz um cinema direto, mas que sabe brincar com as expectativas e os gêneros caros ao entretenimento americano—o faroeste, o musical, a comédia física e até a animação.

Seu personagem, o misterioso Strindler, chega a uma cidadezinha, em 1890—ano de censo nos Estados Unidos—, disposto a pagar pequenas fortunas pelos nomes de trabalhadores mexicanos mortos.

Inventando mentiras, o sujeito vai despertando o afeto, a desconfiança e a ganância dos poderosos locais que podem ajudá-lo nisso.

Para o prefeito e o xerife, ele se apresenta como um oficial do governo. Para o médico, como um agente funerário. Na casa de um fazendeiro, finge ser um pastor disposto a salvar aquelas almas católicas. Há ainda gente como o dono de uma mina, que só fala a língua do dinheiro.

É uma tradução perspicaz do livro original, no qual o especulador Tchitchikov viaja pela província russa comprando nomes de mujiques mortos, numa época em que a servidão ainda era lei no império.

Sem adiantar a conclusão do filme, basta dizer que Cox fará uma ponte irônica com os atuais departamentos de guerra e de imigração americanos, cutucando a violência enraizada no progresso econômico—não só contra os mexicanos, é claro.

De Gógol, o diretor também empresta o humor caricatural, vertido aqui em cenas envolvendo tipos como um cocheiro bêbado, um pistoleiro valentão ou um matador mexicano. Mas é o próprio carisma e aparência de Cox—com caras e bocas adornadas por um topete lambido—que dá traços de "clown" a Strindler, quem rouba a cena tentando escapar das enrascadas.

Nem todas funcionam ou são realmente engraçadas. A atenção às paisagens, outra característica de Gógol que Cox aborda ao registrar as viagens do protagonista entre uma negociação e outra, são talvez as partes menos inspiradas do conjunto, junto do andamento do último terço do filme—atrapalhado na hora de amarrar suas pontas, mas que compensa na catarse final.

Não deixa de ser simbólica, por fim, a polêmica sobre a nacionalidade de Gógol, hoje reivindicada pelos ucranianos. Quantas almas não se contam ou deixam de contar todos os dias só nesse conflito, onde um dos lados busca uma suposta glória ancestral? Pela farsa do cinema, às margens, Cox parece acenar para as guerras presentes e futuras, nas quais os Estados Unidos são um anjo da morte.