Athina Rachel Tsangari’s newest film, Harvest, begins on the precipice of change. Based on Jim Crace’s novel of the same name, Tsangari’s adaptation is set over the course of seven days “around Shakespeare’s time” in an unnamed English village following the Enclosure Acts. Led by Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), whose sleepy voiceover washes over the film, we watch as the common land shifts hands from small farmers to wealthy landowners. Tsangari’s film is punctuated by anxiety, violence, and absence, and in so doing evokes a sliver of time — between the feudal system and industrialization — in European history, one which has been since lost to privatization.
A loose hierarchy is quickly established in Harvest. Walter is first seen traversing the landscape with gusto rather than working in the fields. Draped in blue, he sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the greenery, fingering tree hollows and eating bark before swimming naked in the lake. No one else is seen, until the camera pulls away from Walter and his nature-loving endeavors. Through effective long shots, we can see that the village resembles Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s busy compositions. This is partially because the village is in a fit of chaos and the barn is on fire, but also because the village is littered with allegories as in Bruegel’s work. Walter and Master Charles Kent (Harry Melling), his oldest friend and confidant, are both former townsmen. In the past, Walter served as Master Charles’ manservant, so he can read and write, unlike the other villagers, while Master Charles controls the lay of the land and its future developments.
Unlike Walter and Master Charles, who frolic through the fields as individuals, most of the villagers stick together as a collective, condensed unit. Their lives are not easy. Through their daily routines, songs, and conversations, we learn that the villagers depend on gleaning from Master Charles’ fields after they are commercially harvested. The leftovers from the common land are then distributed according to need, but this system is on the brink of change, and Tsangari uses this to build a pervasive sense of anxiety into the film, one heightened by a cacophony of non-diegetic music hammered into the narrative and Sean Price Williams’ cinematography, which ladles increasing distress onto the mounting unease via shocking, grainy closeups of dirty hands, mud, and carnage. He spends time documenting the villagers’ movement from near and far by combining drone footage with handheld shots that are edited together in rapid fashion. These camera angles add a healthy dose of modernity to Harvest that takes away from the film’s “Peasant Bruegel” aesthetic, but these choices are intentional. Rather than leaning into the Terrence Malick approach to composing landscapes, which feature vast, ethereal tableaux, Williams’ cinematography is fleeting and schizophrenic, of the same spirit as the villagers’ last days on Master Charles’ land.
But, of course, the villagers do not welcome outsiders. Three vagrants are quickly captured and blamed for the fire at the beginning of the film. A woman, Mistress Bedlam (Thalissa Teixeira), has her hair forcibly shorn for the village’s enjoyment while two men spend a week in the pillory. In Crace’s novel, Walter learns that the tree vagrants were forced from their village when it began focusing on sheep-herding rather than farming. This fact is omitted from the film, but complicated by Tsangari, who employs non-white actors in two of these roles, making their presence even more unwanted by the xenophobic villagers. The arrival of Phillip “Mr. Quill” Earle (Arinzé Kene) has a similar effect. Hired as a cartographer, Mr. Quill makes a lay of the undocumented land with Walter’s help. Mr. Quill is overcome by the land’s beauty and Walter’s knowledge of all things great and small, including the border rocks which kids’ heads are thumped against so “they know where they belong.” During one languid scene, they forage weeds and flowers; “naming things is your way of knowing things,” states Mr. Quill, leaving Walter aghast. Unfortunately, Mr. Quill’s benevolence toward the land will not save him. His status is in limbo, partially because his map prefigures the village’s new ownership, but also because he’s Black.
Despite the film’s narrative action, which slowly ramps up after Mistress Bedlam’s arrival, Walter keeps things sleepy. His voiceover reveals his innermost thoughts, which are benign and funny at best. At one point, during a sex scene with Kitty Gosse (Rosy McEwen), he wonders if they are even friends as she flops around on top of him, showcasing his neutrality toward women, and perhaps the villagers in general. He and Master Charles are the most similar characters. They look like they are from the Middle Ages and don peasant attire despite their privilege, but they never really walk the walk. When Master Charles’ cousin Edmund Jourdan (Frank Dillane) shows up in black robes, like the Devil himself, neither Walter nor Master Charles makes a stand for the village, even after a group of women are kidnapped and presumably raped by Edmund’s henchmen. Walter functions as a passive bystander, his moral compass magnetized. He simply watches as the film’s events take place, staring into the distance without saying a word.
In many ways, then, Harvest is deceptive. Rather than being a film about abundance, it’s a tragedy about erasure and absence, and something of a survey of xenophobia thanks to Tsangari’s casting. The Enclosure Acts, and the ensuing agricultural shifts, are a result of the first waves of early Capitalism, thus causing fear and anxiety in the village, two themes that permeate the film. Unfortunately, no one, including our ostensible protagonist, harbors much sympathy for long. Walter’s passivity leaves him alone at the end of the road. Rejected, he thumps his head against the border rocks, accepting his fate. He belongs with the land, and the past, while everybody else moves on.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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