With her small but delicious body of directorial work, Greek New Waver Athina Rachel Tsangari has amassed a loyal fanbase. Her debut “Attenberg” (2010) announced a talent capable of balancing absurdist humor with an infectious warmth for human weirdness. Where lauded contemporary Yorgos Lanthimos makes his characters suffer to drive existential points home, Tsangari uses deadpan observations as a way to affectionately deepen her psychological portraits. Crucially, her creations care about each other, even if they are often hamstrung by certain weaknesses.
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The announcement of a third feature, “Harvest,” world premiering at Venice, nine years on from “Chevalier,” was cause for genuine excitement among Tsangari heads. Forays into a TV miniseries (“Trigonometry” in 2020) and regular producing gigs have been no substitute for a feature film brewed in her singular mind palace. So, how does “Harvest” stack up?
At first glance, it seems like Tsangari has totally switched things up. Her first literary adaptation (both previous films were her original ideas) plunges us into the world dreamed up by novelist Jim Crace. In an unspecified village in the wilds of Scotland on the cusp of industrial change, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry-Jones) is in love with land. He forages bugs from trees, then skinny-dips in a deserted lake. On returning to his village, he finds it is on fire.
As with many of the dramatic events in “Harvest” the medium is the message with imagery that further burnishes the reputation of rising DP star Sean Price Williams. Having first captured the serenity of this place through Walter’s solo revelry, now he captures its ashy filth and danger. This is a film with a comprehensive visual grammar that does not settle for one viewpoint of its absorbing setting. A sense of the charming creativity of living so close to the land is felt when a young girl paints her face using the yellow of a buttercup — she is vying to be crowned “Gleaning Queen.”
Yet these quiet scenes are punctuated with tactile depictions of dirt, not to mention the visceral suffering of a man held in the pillory where maggots feed on his open leg wound. But before there is a risk of languishing in squalid manmade cruelty, Tsangari will cut to a breathtaking golden-hour wide shot of a field. At moments this feels like a Terrence Malick remake of “Dogville.”
In this remote place, Walter is an outsider among outsiders. He is distrusted by most of the villagers, save lover Kitty (Rosy McEwen) because of his friendship with Master Kent (Harry Melling), another soft man but the closest thing to an authority figure here. Walter’s mother was Master Kent’s milk nurse and they shared childhoods. Adulthood has united them in another way, for they are now both widowers and grief clings to the edges of their respective solitudes.
They are both out-of-step with the herd when three strangers are found by the lake and the villagers descend — locking the two men in the pillory and shaving the head of the woman. Master Kent does not know how to use the pillory key and hesitates, nervously. Melling oozes the quiet desperation of a boy in over his head, complicating and enriching his character’s objective position of power.
Nonetheless, all ill deeds here are under his jurisdiction. Kitty steps up to administer the punishment of the woman, Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira from “Trigonometry”). She looks as pale as a wraith as she shears this Black woman’s hair, replicating a method used earlier by villagers shearing a black goat with curly horns. As the men gawp on lustily and take locks of hair as a souvenir, a tear falls from Teixeira’s defiant mask. Humiliation as a punishment is conveyed with a powerful empathy, and what could have been a throwaway plot detail becomes a major emotional beat.
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Head shaved, Beldam is let go. With her friends in the pillory, she does not go far. Walter often spots her running hither and thither, seeming free in contrast with the increasingly preoccupied villagers for a harbinger of change has arrived in the form of the map-maker Quill (Arinzé Kene).
The plot is very much not the point of “Harvest,” and a deliberate vagueness surrounds key events. Later, a man dies, and who’s to say whether it was from murder, suicide or exposure to the elements. We see through Walter’s eyes, who is rarely around when key things happen and frequently unsure of how he can intervene for the better. “Some hero you are, Walter Thirsk,” bellows the man with the leg wound, with contempt. His point stands, although the film treats Walter’s relative ineffectiveness softly, as it does Master Kent’s. There is a sweetness to Tsangari’s depiction of men who technically have power but are too hesitant to make it count.
Her signature humor is present in surprising and joyful ways that give the film a modern twang. It’s a sensibility that shines in something that happens with a boundary stone (that I do not wish to spoil) and in point-of-view switches that land like punchlines. Landry Jones carries the film with a watchful caution not dissimilar to seeing history whoosh past his eyes. The companionable dynamics in his scenes with Melling and Kene are a treat and help to leaven the languor that sets in the back-half of the run-time.
Despite its intentionality, the vagueness of the plot stretched across 130 minutes becomes testing. There is an underwritten aspect to the way that racial tensions are presented, alternately ignored and hinted at without a cohesive perspective. Although made up of many mesmerizing moving parts, “Harvest” ends up as feeling less than the sum of these. There are sparks of what makes an Athina Rachel Tsangari film great within this impressionistic period fable, even if — unlike the fires that bookend the film — it never fully takes the blaze.
Grade: B
“Harvest” world premiered at the 2024 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
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