The film Harvest, which opens with an image of the sky above the wheat fields, triggers a Pavlovian recall of Terrence Malick’s Daze of Heaven. From above our heads, ripening ears of wheat dance to the summer breeze while the fair sky is peeking between the stalks. Caleb Landry Jones appears on the screen, reaching out gently for a butterfly. Then he bites, almost with care, into a lump of wood with moss on it. He gives it a few chews and then spits it out. We have just sidestepped horizontal from the poetry of Malick into the realm of unpredictable and disturbing oddity characteristic of Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari.
Harvest is set in what possibly is a Scottish village at some point in the 18th century, when the greater portions of the countryside were being wracked with an agricultural revolution. Thousands of poor agrarian farmers lost their homes to ‘The Clearances’, which were instituted to expand sheep farming: plowed fields turned into pastures and woods were cut down. Landry Jones takes on the character of Walter Thirsk, who reached this fictional village which is so far out it does not have a name and is acquainted with its inhabitants as simply ‘the village’ because it is the only world that they know. He served as the valet to one Charles Kent, (Harry Melling) whose wife owned the estate after inheriting it.
Walter is just another peasant lately; he has a wife from the native residents and discontinued working with Charles. This does not stop him from being in a close bond with the lord of the manor, which is always a distinguishing factor. And since both their wives are dead, thus the master and the servant are even more united by this loss. Their current bond is the country. Thirsk is a good hand; he is popular in the village. Nevertheless, as he mentions in a faintly whispered narration, he is aware that anyone “who wasn’t born with this dirt under their fingernails” has a different descent and can always be an alien.
When other outsiders come into the picture, each with a distinctly different menace, that characteristic of being an outsider starts to take a dangerous connotation. There is a coarse gang of fellow refugees of another clearance that has taken to water and landed on the shores of the loch; when the master’s barn catches flames and is torched in a mysterious incident, they become prime suspects. There is the cartographer Quill (Arinze Kene) with a heavy Nigerian accent, whose beautiful illustrations, which depict the endless rolling common fields, provide an insight into the plans of their destruction. Quill works for one Edmund Jordan, the man who has successfully claimed ownership of that land since Lady Kent’s demise.
The arriving Jordan band, headed by Kent’s weak wiled relative, with a few thugs who beat up the men and manhandle the women, marks the end of the lifestyle they are used to. Even their master, a gentle, defenseless man who can’t even tame his horse, folds in no time and goes as far as to cede his farmer overall and assume business wear. The villagers realize that their confidence has been misplaced, mostly by themselves. Thirsk agonizes, what must the aggressors think of us in such circumstances.
Tsangari’s film is also like the novel Jim Crace wrote the screenplay from; it is seldom poetical and never emotional. While not quite turning it into an a history lesson, she explains just how backbreaking it is to cultivate this soil: There are vague allusions to periods of the year which are dark and shabby, and wide angle views of their pathetic huts, located around a slough in which pigs root around for food. Everybody, anyways, is filthy. All the time. It is not the paradise of Malick, although it is everything they have ever been acquainted to.
Nor will there be any angels today. These people are not nice either, but they are nice people who are deep rooted conservatives, the sort of conservatives who believe that a yeoman should not learn his letters. The forms of punishment are bestial; so is the harvest festival when sufficient amount of drink has been consumed. However, even amidst the flickering of fires and the fighting, the village musicians are seen whose fiddles and voices in unison are heard soaring above the drunken chaos. Tsingari’s story is interwoven with account of these particulars expanding in detail the picture of a people, which from the outside seems intact, but is on its last limbs inside.
Firm in belief, Thirsk explains it the best way possible: he’s the one surrounded by the best people (us) and willing to speak candidly. He is a man who rarely speaks his mind to the people around him and is indeed self contained and stoic, being aware of his standing and of the risk of disturbing the balance of the community if he speaks when he does not have to. A character who has many different layers but in his environment does not have a lot of ways to express them. Landry Jones dives into the character like a half drowned man coming up for air, ready to be zipped and ruined by Tsingari, so hard he has to be dubbed over.
Listening to this narration is half the problem, as most of it is taken verbatim from Crace’s novel and all its surface ornamentation remains. The many elisions of plot and character compel in their own right, as we do not get any answers or any final instance of certainty as to what happened or who was to be held accountable. Rather, we struggle with time in the dialogues (‘OK’ comes out a number of times) and other elements such as sets and casting that go against the tenets of realism. This is a tale a tale, what is more, told by Athina Rachel Tsingari so it has its conventions. Not everyone will be enamoured with the eccentricities of those conventions but for some of us those who have a fascination for far corners of the earth and its inhabitants actually carrying out the tasks that Tsangari requires of us is quite enjoyable.
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