There is a sense-memory of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven when Harvest begins; we are in the midst of a wheatfield, the ripe ears above us, the blue sky glimpsed between the stalks. Caleb Landry Jones appears, caressing a butterfly. Then he bites off a piece of mossy wood, chews experimentally and spits it out; we have just shifted sideways from Malick’s lyricism into the unpredictably strange, unforgiving world of Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari.
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Venice competition title Harvest is set in what is probably a Scottish village sometime in the 18th century, when much of the country was being convulsed by an agricultural revolution. During the Clearances, thousands of peasant farmers were evicted to make way for industrial-scale sheep farming, their fields grassed, and woods razed for pasture. Landry Jones plays Walter Thirsk, who came to this imaginary village — so remote that it doesn’t require a name, simply being called “the village” by the people for whom it is the whole world — as manservant to Charles Kent (Harry Melling), whose wife had inherited the estate.
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Walter is just another villager now, having also married a local woman and left Charles’ service, but he retains an ambivalent intimacy with the lord of the manor that sets him apart. Both their wives have since died, which means master and servant are further bonded by grief. It is the country that holds them now. Thirsk is a good hand; the villagers like him well enough. Even so, as he tells us in a strangely muttered voiceover, he knows that anybody “who wasn’t born with this dirt under their fingernails” will always be an outsider.
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The meaning of his perpetual outsider status shifts dangerously when other strangers appear, each presenting a different kind of threat. There is the rough trio of refugees from another clearance who have arrived by boat and set up camp by the loch; when the master’s barn is mysteriously burned down, they become convenient scapegoats. There is the cartographer Quill (Arinze Kene) with his strong Nigerian accent, whose beautiful drawings of the rolling common fields are the blueprint for their destruction. Quill is employed by one Edmund Jordan, the ultimate owner of this land since Kent’s wife’s death.
When the Jordan posse arrives — led by Kent’s effete cousin, backed by a bunch of enforcers who rough up the men and manhandle the women — it is clear that the lives they have always known are over. The master, a weak and kindly man who cannot control even his own horse, crumples immediately, even submitting to giving up his farmer’s smock for a suit. The villagers know they have been betrayed, not least by themselves. The invaders must be astonished, reflects Thirsk, at how meek we are.
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Like the novel by Jim Crace on which it is based, Tsangari’s film is rarely lyrical and never sentimental. Without making a history lesson out of it, she conveys how hard it is to work this land; there are glancing references to the hungry, cold times of year and panoramic shots of their mean huts, set around a mire where pigs snuggle for scraps. Everyone is dirty, all the time. It isn’t Malick’s heaven, even if it is all they know.
Nor are there any angels here. These people are not unkind, but they have the kind of deep conservatism that holds that it is a not a yeoman’s place to learn to read. Punishments are brutal; so is the harvest festival once enough drink has been taken. Seen through the flicker of firelight and fighting, however, are the village musicians, whose fiddles and harmonizing voices rise pure and sweet above the revelry. Tsingari’s narrative weaves between these details, gradually building a layered vision of a society that, under an unchanged surface, is in the throes of terminal rupture.
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As our anchor and narrator, Thirsk speaks his mind to us in a way that he rarely does to the people around him; he is reserved, stolid and conscious of his place, careful to remain silent if speaking might upset the community’s equilibrium. A complex character, in other words, but with limited opportunities for conveying that complexity. Landry Jones plunges into the role like a sweaty man plunging into a cool loch, offering himself up to all the mud and tree-eating Tsingari can throw at him, while embracing the dialect so fervently that his voiceover has to be subtitled.
It takes work to listen to this narration, much of which is lifted straight from Crace’s novel with its literary embroideries left intact. The ambiguities of plot and character make their own demands, since we are given no answers or final certainties about what happens or who to blame. Instead we wrestle with anachronisms in the dialogue (“OK” is a frequent response), plus scenery and casting that run up hard against the rules of realism. This is a story – a story told by Athina Rachel Tsingari, moreover — which means it has its own rules. The idiosyncrasies of those rules won’t appeal to everyone, but for those of us drawn to remote places and the people who live in them, doing the work that Tsangari demands is a real pleasure.
Title: Harvest
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Sales agent: The Match Factory
Director: Athina Rachel Tsangari
Screenwriters: Joslyn Barnes, Athina Rachel Tsangari
Cast: Caleb Landry Jones, Harry Melling, Rosy McEwen, Arinzé Kene, Thalissa Teixeira, Frank Dillane
Running time: 2 hr 11 mins
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