It’s been nine years since Athina Rachel Tsangari’s last film “Chevalier,” a mordant contemporary satire of toxic male ego and destructive dick-measuring contests. Much has changed in the Greek writer-director’s third feature “Harvest” — her first English-language work, her first literary adaptation and by some measure her most ornate and expensive production to date, set some centuries in the past — but the theme of petty, ruinous patriarchy holds strong. Taking on British author Jim Crace’s Booker-shortlisted historical novel about a farming community undone by parochial distrust and encroaching capitalism, Tsangari’s vigorous, yeasty period piece occasionally loses the thread of its sprawling ensemble narrative, but transfixes as a whole-sackcloth immersion into another time and place.
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Quite what time and what place is up for debate, however. As in Crace’s novel, neither is specified, though the accents and craggy-lush landscape — the film was shot on location in Argyllshire, Scotland — point emphatically northwards, while the year could be any in the 17th or even early 18th centuries: before the Industrial Revolution, but after the advent of inclosure acts that saw previously common land privatized, ending the open-field system of the Middle Ages. The blurriness of the milieu goes some way toward suggesting the entrenched customs of a community that has been largely resistant to the passage of time, though there’s nothing vague about the impressively gnarled, oxidized production design by Nathan Parker (“The Kitchen,” “I Am Not a Witch”), with its weather-whittled timber structures held together by mud and mold and habit.
It’s when one such building — the stable of the farmstead — is set mysteriously on fire one evening that things begin to go awry in this hitherto efficient, nameless village, cuing a long, tumultuous week of recriminations and revenge. The lord of the manor, Master Kent (a superb Harry Melling, both alpha and beta, puppy and wolf), tends not to heavy-handedly wield his status over the villagers, advocating instead the more socialist model of land-sharing preferred by his late wife, the original heir to the estate. But the people demand consequences for the blaze, settling on three unfamiliar drifters — two men and one woman — as the culprits without trial or evidence. As punishment, the men are yoked to the local pillory for a week; the woman, Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira), is subjected to a forced head shave and hissing accusations of witchcraft.
Uneasy with this vindictive turn of events is the village’s lone-wolf misfit, Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones, sporting a creditable semi-Scots burr) — a former townsman who came to farming through a spirited love of nature, and who was raised and educated alongside Kent, his mother having been employed as the young lord’s nursemaid. That class-straddling background makes Thirsk something of a go-between in the community, though it leaves him swiftly without allies once hostilities surface between factions.
Which they do, spiraling rapidly, when two further outsiders enter this hitherto placid spot of green. One is Earle (Arinzé Kene), a worldly cartographer hired by Kent to make the first map of the region, in the process giving titles and labels to landmarks and flora that were previously unnamed. The other is Jordan (Frank Dillane of TV’s “Fear the Walking Dead”), Kent’s cousin by marriage and the estate’s official heir, who turns up with brisk, decidedly non-communal ideas for turning the land into a profitable livestock farm. With his chilly hauteur and unflattering Prince Valiant hairdo, Jordan is a plain villain amid characters who otherwise collectively lurch between sympathetic victimhood and viciously cruel mob mentality. Thirsk may be the closest thing to a protagonist here, but he’s a teasingly passive one, loyal to the land above all else, with no evident desires or ambitions beyond that fidelity.
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Though this isn’t an all-male collective — “Blue Jean” star Rosy McEwen makes an impression as one of the most reactionary villagers, with Teixeira tersely defiant as the first target of her ire — “Harvest” locates the imperiously masculine dynamics of ownership and competition on which this transitional era of history (and many before and since) pivoted, with personal wealth prioritized over the greater good of the people, to say nothing of the environment. The non-specific setting underlines the point that this is a narrative we’re still living through, not least in the age of climate change: Tsangari tellingly closes the film with a dedication to her own grandparents in Greece, “whose farmland is now a highway.”
Yet while “Harvest” is dense in construction and mulchy in atmosphere, it’s not a dour moral parable. There’s a mordant humor to its examination of class conflict and certain arcane traditions that probably should give way to modernity — a droll running joke involves the custom of instructively slamming children’s heads on the local boundary-marking stone — and the storytelling is so busy and fevered that the film, heavy in some respects, never feels stiff. If anything, it’s a bit antsy. The villagers are compelling as a mass but never fully articulated as individuals, despite fine, flavorful ensemble work across the board. Tsangari and Joslyn Barnes’ script outlines racial discrimination against the characters of Earle and Mistress Beldam, but doesn’t really get around to the subject.
Yet as a feat of world-building — and later, world-dismantling — “Harvest” consistently dazzles, creating a convincingly unified and imperiled ecosystem through Parker’s richly textured designs, the velvet-and-hessian contrasts of Kirsty Halliday’s grungy, sweat-stained costumes and the itchy grain and weather-faded finish of Sean Price Williams’ beautiful-not-pretty cinematography, with its occasionally Bruegel-ian crowd compositions. The film’s images are alive not just to the grassy, insect-scored allure of the British summer but the less romantic swirls and spatters and outright mush of the earth beneath the characters’ feet — dank and dirty but still full of possibility, not yet neutered and paved over by the onset of industry. It’s no Edenic idyll, but it’s a kind of paradise lost.
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