Chevauchée avec le diable
(Ride with the Devil)

In Ride with the Devil, Ang Lee moves the Civil War away from the glorious battlefields to explore its margins — those of guerrilla warfare, fledging loyalties, and raw barbarity. Like Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales, he questions the moral fate of the defeated and the ghosts of a decaying nation. But whereas Eastwood sought possible redemption in a solitary gesture leading to the utopian rebuilding of a marginalized community, Lee films war as a horizonless disaster — an impossible brotherhood corroded by vengeance and violence. In muddy forests and makeshift cabins, time stands still and reasons dissolve: only bare fury remains, gnawing at ideals and eating away at bodies. War is no longer an event but a condition — a slow collapse of conscience, where fear corrodes identity and loyalty becomes another form of exile. Jérôme Baron