“O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.”
Hamlet – Act II, scene ii
Like the best cinema––or, at least, the kind I respond to most passionately––the films of Ben Rivers immerse us in stories that aren’t as interested in solving enigmas as letting us luxuriate in them. To say that very little happens in Bogancloch––a follow-up to the director’s 2011 feature debut, Two Years at Sea––is both technically correct and frustratingly reductive. For a little less than 90 minutes, Rivers’s latest tracks an old man as he go about a life of self-subsistence in the middle of the woods––all we do is watch him bathe, cook, hike, hunt, and sleep.
His name is Jake Williams, a Scottish musician who’s lived in this remote corner of Aberdeenshire for decades, and whom Rivers had already immortalized in his 2007 short This Is My Land and then again in Two Years at Sea. You do not need to have watched either to follow the action here––not because Bogancloch has none, but because fact-telling just isn’t the type of exercise Rivers is concerned with. Bogancloch is so parsimonious with contextual information as to accrue an almost universal, timeless quality. Jake’s name is never uttered, nor is his rustic house’s, which lends the film its title. Were it not for a campfire singalong to an old Scots ballad by Hamish Henderson, “The Flyting o’ Life and Daith,” you wouldn’t even be able to tell where in the world this secluded woodland was.
That’s because Bogancloch does away with all the most basic demands of conventional storytelling; it invites contemplation rather than comprehension. Rivers’s goal isn’t to satisfy your curiosity so much as stoke it, and in a time when films that refuse to spoon-feed information to their viewers or connect the dots for them have come to be regarded as irredeemably pretentious, there’s something almost subversive about his approach. Jake is a hermit, and his existence remains fittingly hermetic. We leave this pastoral portrait with no idea as to who he really is, who he was, what on earth led him to abandon civilization and seek refuge in a cottage shrouded in ivy and pine trees. Which isn’t to suggest the film tells us nothing whatsoever about him, only that the few clues we’re handed out do not fit neatly together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; every little secret or backstory Rivers gestures at unfurls another, like the petals of a flower.
Interspersed within this chronicle of Jake’s sedentary life are traces of a more nomadic past; time and again, the screen cuts to black for a second or two before opening again on some worn-out photographs of sunny cities and sandy streets. I counted eight such pics, each progressively more abstract than the other, with blisters and scratches turning buildings and highways into hellish visions out of a Francis Bacon painting. One of them features a road sign pointing to Dubai; it’s the only clear geographical coordinate in a film that otherwise exists in a space-time limbo. I can only infer these stills are snapshots of Jake’s old trips around the world––one of them finds him sitting on a sidewalk looking considerably younger. I do not know who took it, or when, or where exactly. Nor do I know the connection between the man and the songs––all in Arabic––that echo from old cassettes he plays in-between chores.
Bogancloch might be a very laconic film, but it is not a quiet one. Music plays a prominent role, whether heard in those wistful tapes or the Henderson tune intoned around the fire or the few others Jake croons every now and then––including Irving Berlin’s evergreen “Blue Skies.” But it’s the diegetic sounds that echo from the cottage and the woods around it that take center stage. In a film so attuned to the textures of Jake’s life––not a character study but a study of a character and his relationship with the world he inhabits––the noises that billow like dust motes from his house and verdant surroundings combine in a symphony that elevates the whole journey into a heavenly realm.
In a beautiful essay for Cinema Guild’s home release of Two Years at Sea, Dennis Lim noted it is difficult to tell whether the sequestered worlds into which Rivers likes to beckon us are post-apocalyptic or prelapsarian, if characters are bracing for or have already gone through the fall; “one man’s dystopia may very well be another’s utopia.” So it is with Bogancloch. Up until Rivers trains his camera on a group of hikers, you’d be forgiven for thinking Jake was the only human left on Earth. But there’s nothing spectral or ominous about his self-reclusion. The mood here is never funereal, but uplifting, almost jubilant; even Berlin’s song heightens this, its first chirpy couplet going “Blue skies, smilin’ at me / Nothin’ but blue skies do I see.”
Jake isn’t a man who’s survived the Armageddon, but one that seems to have entered a more wholesome rapport with the universe around him. And by celebrating a way of being stripped down to the bare necessities, Rivers is also celebrating a more elemental approach to cinema, fiercely impervious to the demands of traditional storytelling and wholly open to the kind of wonders that would normally go unseen. With its capacity to wring bliss and beauty out of the most mundane routines, the film approximates something close to what Herzog once called “ecstatic truth”––that mysterious, elusive type of truth that can only be reached through imagination. By the time Bogancloch wraps with an entrancing drone shot, the camera levitating skyward and dwarfing Jake and his house into infinitesimal dots, this tiny corner of the Highlands has become an immense expanse, this shaggy-haired loner a king of infinite space.
Bogancloch premiered at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival.
The post Locarno Review: Ben Rivers’ Entrancing Bogancloch Invites Contemplation and Defies Comprehension first appeared on The Film Stage.
