CALEB LANDRY JONES IN HARVEST

ATHINA RACHEL TSANGARI: HARVEST (2024) - NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL

Meandering portrait of last days of a medieval English village

One tends to get lost in this well-meaning but meanderng adaptaton of an eponymous Jim Crace novel which has too little sense of economy or pace. Though the director's origins in the Greek weird wave might suggest surreal and irrational elements, mostly this film merely seems dutiful, but ineffective. For festival goers looking for an offbeat approach to the waning of the middle ages it might be worth a watch and inspire a thought, but it's not successful.

Keith Uhlich in his recent Slant review describes this as a "moody-verging-on-mopish" adaptation, one that's "handsomely mounted" but in which "much of the filth feels stage-managed." The topic is the waning of a social order through the microcosm of a vaguely defined village. Its leading figure somehow seems to be a certain Walter Thirsk (a more conventional than sometimes Caleb Landry Jones), who grew up beside the local laird because his mother was his wet nurse, and who learned to read and write, a quality lacked by most cohabitants of the town. But he, especially played by Landry Jones, emerges as a strange misfit, chewing on bark.

All we really know is that the archaic equivalent of the medieval lord of the manor Master Kent (Harry Melling), is soon to be robbed of his function when his smug, manipulative cousin Jordan (Frank Dillane) comes along and tells the ineffectual Kent that he is taking over and that it's all going to be reorganized, not as a tradtional whole society any more but for purely mercantile and profitable purposes, and going to be run from town. He arranges for most of the villagers to be expelled and professional workers to come later for planting and harvesting, and then himself departs again.

But first a symbolic evidence of the little society's diruption, a big fire of a tall barn, which seems symbolic because it has no particular effect. Walter damages his hand fighting the fire and we keep being reminded of it. It won't get any better, you know. But the film also tends to forget it. Several men, grabbed as suspects, are locked up in stocks, and the brutality of this archaic punishment is emphasized. A woman is also chosen who gets her head shaved. One of the men loses most of one leg to a hungry hog.

Another strange brutality: a local custom that seems preposterous but may have its. basis in fact: many of the children are taken and their foreheads banged down on a big stone to show them the boundary line, wherein they're stupposed to stay, and to remind them of their place in the order of things. Speaking of boundaries, there is an exotic black map maker - with such an unfunctional functionary one might think Peter Greenaway was around - who is constantly working on an artisinal map of the region which is out of date well before he finishes it, and arouses suspiciion and dislike.

One can sympathize with Peter Bradshaw's exasperated Guardian review penned at Venice, giving the film one out of five stars. Bradshaw describes the film as populated by a host of "smudgy-faced folk" preparing for the titular harvest who are "sporting various funny hats and Dionysiac masks" and he says the head-banging-on-rocks ritual for kids takes us "very close to Lars von Trier territory." This is supposed to be on the edge of Scotland but Bradshaw says Landry Jones' accent locates him more clearly in "the same part of Sherwood Forest as Russell Crowe’s Robin Hood."

Bradshaw points to the "ploddingly unvaried pace" and the "undirected, underpowered performances" as why this becomes an "exasperating experience" and "a directionless, shallow movie which seems bafflingly unconvincing and inauthentic at every turn." But for me what undermines the whole most surely is what a cruel and shallow bad guy the evil cousin is. Perhaps this whole thing in the end will provides some laughs. But that clearly is not what was intended.

Harvest, 131 mins., debuted at Venice Sept. 6, 2024; also shown at Toronto, Busan New York, and BFI London. Screened at the NYFF for this review. Metacritic rating: 67%.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.