Industrial Devolution
By Saffron Maeve
New York Film Festival 2024:
Harvest
Athina Rachel Tsangari, United Kingdom, no distributor
A remote English village is toppled by xenophobia and piggish capitalism in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s latest, set after the Enclosure Act of 1604 stamped out England and Wales’s open-field system of agriculture in favor of private property. Taking place sometime between this privatization and the Industrial Revolution, Harvest, an earthy, intrepid adaptation of Jim Crace’s 2013 pastoral novel, is a rebuff to structures of exploitation through the ages. The film opens on manservant and outcast Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) engaging in an erotic tryst with nature: chewing the bark off branches and tonguing tree hollows before plunging nude into the river, likely high on mushrooms, an apparent staple of the village.
Upon returning home, Walter finds the townspeople frenzied and the farmstead ablaze. His employer and childhood friend Master Kent (Harry Melling), who oversees the land, scapegoats three passing vagrants for the arson; two men are sentenced to spend a week clamped in a pillory, while a woman, Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira), has her hair forcibly sheared before being thrown into the forest where she lurks for days, true to her name, like an exiled witch. This hellish incident sets in motion a cycle of misfortune that destabilizes the village, a farming community, which is, by local accord, “not pressed to God’s bosom” so much as “at his fingertips,” a three-day journey out from any signs of civilization. Harvest was shot by Sean Price Williams on 16mm, a choice that gives an appropriately granular texture to lingering close-ups of toiling hands reaping wheat and ram’s wool, images of labor soon to be unsettled by a new order.
The unease felt by the locals is fomented by an increased presence of outsiders. First, the cartographer Phillip “Quill” Earle (Arinzé Kene), who is tasked with designing a map of the area, throws the villagers off balance. They are highly skeptical of his presence and of being concomitantly “flattened” on a map, consigned to the present with no history or future. Empathetic to Quill’s interloper status, Walter shows him around the village and surrounding oak wood, marsh, loch, and moor, sharing anecdotes about the locality and his late wife, killed by a bee sting. In his view, Quill’s task is one of affection, documenting and labeling the region; his brushstrokes are primed with imparted personal histories, and specimens of local flora are spilling out of his workbook, waiting to be cataloged. “Naming things is knowing them,” he tells Walter.
The second arrival is far less amiable, with the odious, affluent Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) coming to claim his entitlement to the land from his cousin Master Kent, who sheepishly yields to his demands. Master Jordan’s goal of turning the land into profitable pasture arrives just as the farmers are celebrating their annual gleaning tradition of taking home whatever they may collect in the fields. This privatization and forfeiture of Master Kent’s ideals is immediately felt by the community, many of whom are castigated by Master Jordan’s cronies, who also abduct and assault the townswomen in a nearby manor.
Chieftain of the Greek Weird Wave—a movement of Greco-absurdist cinema emergent in the late aughts which echoed the country’s economic anxieties in nontraditional film narratives—Tsangari produced Yorgos Lanthimos’s Kinetta (2005), Dogtooth (2007), and Alps (2011), and directed her own offbeat features, The Slow Business of Going (2000), Attenberg (2010), and Chevalier (2015). Her directorial projects have contended with isolation, assimilation, and mortality, each one feeling through the abiding humor within insular conditions. In Attenberg, this is a sexually inexperienced 23-year-old playfully acting on her desires as she comes to terms with her father’s terminal illness, and in Chevalier, this is a yacht-ful of virulent, dick-measuring men engaging in screwy rituals on the Aegean Sea. Harvest, by contrast, plays more like a routine historical drama, where the threat of so-called “progress” hampers a society’s self-determination. Being Tsangari’s first English-language feature, the film relinquishes some of her steadily calamitous humor and Greek locales, while preserving her institutional critiques of capitalism and chauvinism. The erosion of the village’s open-field system somersaults into a broader atmosphere of sexual violence, where the men’s negligence and complicity are confronted. There are also sequences which bear Tsangari’s stamp of discomforting comedy; at one point, a troupe of children are guided by a town elder to the village border, where they take turns thumping their heads forcefully against a bolder, “so they know where they belong.”
Some will find Harvest a laborious installment in Tsangari’s oeuvre, though its more anemic qualities—a pragmatic plot, lack of characterization, and tonal unevenness—seem to work in the film’s favor. The story lacks an emotional, individualized center, a void left vacant by the ostensible protagonist Walter, who is woefully detached. However, this plays as a consequence of modernization and uniformity, where the village’s relational networks are made increasingly obtuse, while the asymmetrical tone emulates the friction of tradition and modernity which lines the plot. The film thoughtfully appraises how upper-crust idealism brushes up against agrarian labor, while underscoring the judgments buried in notions of “heritage” and “convention.”
One can envision a version of Harvest that plays into its occult activity, like Tsangari’s obscure 2015 short film The Capsule, which fuses ritual, fetish, and anthropomorphism to devise a feminine mythos. Instead, Harvest’s Beldam character skulks at the edges of the frame, never quite vindicated or answered for. There is also a sense of indecision to the film’s racial politics; Quill and Mistress Beldam are both Black and endure pointed ostracization by paranoid villagers, but the script does not interrogate these indignities as fully it does issues of class and gender.
The project is heavy with unostentatious ideas, but Harvest is most compelling visually—it’s rich with images of arms combing through tall, verdant grasslands, clusters of lofty clouds, shears tearing through wool. Williams’s camera is rapt with imposing, georgic scenery as well as its collateral: pits of mud, grimy bodies writhing in the dark, hog-chewed limbs—all suitably rustic, while poignantly observing the disappearance of a place and its people. Fittingly, then, Harvest is bracketed by territorial sequences in which Walter lays a claim to the land: from his opening forest-fuck to an instance when he scoops up and inhales piss-soaked dirt declaring, “You are me and me is you,” to a final head thump against the border rocks. In these moments of reclamation, Tsangari lays bare her themes of attachment, belonging, and immaterial possession.