An unnamed village, an unknown time; somewhere in Britain, sometime in the Late Middle Ages, something is about to end. Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest sees the twilight of an old social order, but is not mourning a paradise lost. That would be too simplistic a comparison for a filmmaker whose work has always succeeded in weaving the allegorical with the political, such as gender constructs in Attenberg or Chevalier. Nine years after the latter, the Greek director returns to feature filmmaking with an adaptation of Jim Crace’s acclaimed book of the same name, making Harvest her third film and first period piece.
Harvest season comes with warm yellows (fields), bright greens (meadows), and deep blues (the lake). Amidst all of this beauty, we find Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), a villager whose bright eyes and pale skin may mislead you: he is so deeply immersed in this natural world––its cycles, greens, and grasses––that the camera sees him as an extension of his surroundings. The iconic Sean Price Williams has lensed Harvest in a most beguiling way, retaining his usual dynamism reserved for human faces and happenings, but transposing it over landscapes and village rituals with an unmistakable tenderness found in pans, zooms, and close-ups.
In the course of the film, we find out that, all this notwithstanding, Walter is not native to this land. In fact, he and the mayor Charles Kent (a very vulnerable Harry Melling) were childhood friends who grew up in a town. When Kent married his since-deceased wife, he came in possession of the land and the farms, while Walter fell in love with a local woman and stepped down from his post as manservant. All this context is important to ground the characters, but they are expressive without too many details. Strong bonds hold the village together, occasional gossip and suspicion aside, and they are visible in how they relate to one another. The horizontality is striking, not only because Master Kent is charitable, but also because of his palpable grief––as if his late wife lives on through the people.
But the seeds of progress (and progressivism) have already been sown and the pastoral bliss disrupted. On one hand, a group of foreigners are caught, humiliated, and bound to a pillory as scapegoats paying the price for a recently occurred fire; on the other, the commons are being privatized. Harvest never mentions the legislation that first affected open fields and common land in England and Wales in 1604 (known as the Enclosure Act) but it exemplifies the larger transition from agriculture to industrialism. Knowing Tsangari’s work and political bite, it’s no surprise to see a world crumbling (symbolically) over the course of only a week with little-to-zero nostalgia. Sentimentality is not something the Greek director is interested in, but her films are sensitive and deeply caring, especially to their own flawed characters.
With a script adapted by Tsangari and Oscar nominee Joslyn Barnes, Harvest remains very faithful to its primary source, with the exception that it makes Walter the protagonist throughout: his voiceover is sparse, but guiding, and most of all his silent acts of observation are measured only by Landry Jones’ glimmering eyes placing him at the center. The complex emotions at this film’s core (an anti-nostalgic appreciation for loss) are made most palpable in scenes Walter shares with a cartographer played by Arinzé Kene. The mere appearance of maps foreshadows the new concept of property, profitability, and colonialism, but there are also the kinds of maps that trace terrain as if it was a living, animated being. Upon seeing such a map for the first time, Walter––clearly enamored by the village and its surroundings––compares it to magic.
Just as a mapped slice of the land can affect a person, Harvest believes in the power of cinema to reenchant the world. There are many scenes where one is reminded of Terrence Malick’s grand humanism (in both mood and visuals), but Tsangari does much more than what any comparisons can capture. Transitions are never easy to summarize and only in retrospect can one make historical sense out of them, but thankfully Harvest (neither the book nor film) operates on the level of humanism and micro-history, conjuring the feeling it’s possible to inhabit a lost past––even for a little bit––as if it was a myth, before we made the crushing reality that eventually overtook our present and future.
Harvest premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival.
The post Venice Review: Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest Beautifully Renders the Past Present first appeared on The Film Stage.
