As a gamer who has spent countless hours immersed in historical strategy games, I found Athina Rachel Tsangari’s latest offering, “Harvest”, to be a captivating journey into the past. The film’s deliberate vagueness about its setting and time period adds an intriguing layer of mystery, transforming the story into a timeless tale that could happen anywhere, anytime.
Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari’s latest production is “Harvest,” released in 2021, following her successful black comedy, “Chevalier” from 2015. Her previous works, “Attenberg” (2010) and “The Slow Business of Going” (2000), were critically acclaimed and positioned her as a leading figure in the Greek Weird Wave, alongside her compatriot Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”). Tsangari frequently produced Lanthimos’ early work. Now, she returns to Venice, where “Attenberg” created quite an impact, with “Harvest,” a more mature and serious film compared to her previous works. While it retains elements of the weird, it is primarily melancholic and tinged with woe, adapted from Jim Crace’s celebrated novel of the same name. The result is a poignant yet purposefully timeless exploration of a once-idyllic agricultural utopia.
Similar to Crace’s novel, Harvest the movie doesn’t explicitly state its time and location. However, the Scottish accents of the cast, ranging from Glaswegian to the distinctive Highland dialect, strongly imply a setting north of Hadrian’s Wall. The story seems to be placed around the period between approximately 1750 and 1860, during the Highland Clearances when many Scottish arable lands were emptied. Farmers were forced to either renegotiate their tenancies and become crofters or leave entirely, as landowners aimed to transform communally farmed fields into more profitable grazing grounds for sheep and cattle. It was filmed in Argyllshire.
The Clearances, which significantly fueled urban growth and the Scottish diaspora that impacted the British Empire during the Industrial Revolution, are generally viewed as a tragic event by the Scottish people, particularly those on the left who idealize pre-Clearance communities as early forms of socialist societies. Authors such as Tsangari and Crace lean towards this perspective. The unnamed village in Harvest is portrayed as a sort of paradise, where villagers happily work together in the fields and celebrate at the harvest festival with the local landowner. This lack of specific historical context or location makes the village seem idyllic.
The script doesn’t romanticize the past blindly. While the narrative is presented by Walter Thirsk (effectively portrayed by Caleb Landry Jones with a fitting accent), the camera subtly captures the guilty glances of a group of young men as they ponder who initiated the fire that everyone works together to extinguish at the beginning of the film. Thirsk sustains an injury to his hand while saving Willowjack, Master Charles Kent’s (Harry Melling, demonstrating versatility) horse. It’s hinted that Thirsk is somewhat more intelligent than most of his peers due to growing up with Kent and learning to read and write. However, he also exhibits a passive, nature-loving personality, making him an outsider despite his long residence in the area and marriage to a local woman, who has since passed away.
It could be why he hardly objects when everyone is quick to accuse the group of strangers near the scene as the culprits of the fire. Once apprehended, Gary Maitland and Noor Dillan-Night are publicly punished without a proper hearing. Thalissa Teixeira, the woman among them, has her hair shorn off by one of the townsfolk, Kitty Gosse.
These are only the first encounters with strangers in what turns out to be a very eventful week. Another newcomer is Phillip Earle (Arinze Kene), a cartographer with a distinctly un-Scottish accent who has been hired by Master Kent to draw a map of the town and its environs. Given that his injured hand prevents harder labor, Thirsk is seconded to help Earle, whom the villagers nickname Quill. Thirsk’s new duties include preparing vellum and identifying the various landmarks in the area, few of which have more than the most generic of names. (For instance, the loch is simply called “the loch.”) Earle is delighted with the opportunity to play Adam in this Eden and start dispensing new proper names for the marshes, the fields and so forth.
1. The locals aren’t fond of Earle naming or depicting things because they believe it’s a way to define and ultimately destroy them, which may sound medieval and mystical but there’s some truth to it. As it turns out, Earle is working for Edmund Jordan, played by Frank Dillane from “Fear the Walking Dead,” who delights in being overly villainous. Jordan, the only living relative of Master Kent’s deceased wife, stands to inherit the estate, not Kent. He intends to significantly expand sheep farming, following the pattern of the Highland Clearances, which won’t end well. By the finale, there will be multiple deaths, one of them being an unusual fatality: drowning from someone forcing urine into another person’s mouth, a gruesome mix of waterboarding and a golden shower.
That last scene is just on the cusp of silly, and some viewers may find themselves giggling in a way the filmmakers surely didn’t intend. The urge may arise elsewhere, too. Working with the half-declamatory, half-poetic style of the script, the cast end up sounding like the doltish peasants from Monty Python and the Holy Grail who can tell a person is highborn because they don’t have “shit all over them.” The awkwardness may be partly attributable to the fact that this is Tsangari’s first English-language feature in over two decades. Or perhaps it was intentional.
It can be challenging to discern the intentions behind the character portrayals in “Harvest,” such as Earle being an educated Black man during an era when this was scarcely common, or the strangers appearing darker than the village’s predominantly pale Scottish residents. This may hint at the resurgence of racism, reminiscent of Brexit and its aftermath, not only in Britain but also in various modern societies worldwide. However, despite these complexities, “Harvest” remains a robust and compelling work, much like an aged oak tree. It exudes a rich appreciation for nature and possesses a unique flavor, much like a well-crafted homebrew ale.
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2024-09-02 17:25