Caribe Landry Jones adapted from the novel by Jim Kress

Greek writer-director-producer Athina Rachel Tsangari’s last feature film was 2015’s ChevalierA sly black comedy that satirizes male hypercompetition and builds on her previous two critically acclaimed works, Attenberg (2010) and Progress is slow (2000). These put her at the forefront of the Greek weird wave, along with her compatriot Yorgos Lanthimos (poor thing), She often painted her early works. Now Sangari is back in Venice Attenberg caused such a stir harvestA decidedly mature and sober work – less weird than The Scoundrel and Woad Colors – is an adaptation of Jim Kress’s acclaimed novel of the same name. The result is a moving, ahistorical study of a lost agricultural paradise.

Like Kress’s book, harvest The movie never specifies when or where the story takes place. However, the orchestra’s Scottish accents, ranging from Glaswegian to more northerly, teacher The rhythm of the Highlands itself suggests a place north of Hadrian’s Wall. (The film was filmed in Argyllshire.) The story appears to be set between about 1750 and 1860, when the Highland Clearances decimated Scotland’s farming population. Scots were forced to either change the terms of their leases and become tenant farmers, or move away altogether, as landowners sought to convert common farmland into more profitable sheep and cattle pasture.

While the Clearances arguably helped launch the Industrial Revolution in cities further south and created a Scottish diaspora that profoundly shaped and built the British Empire, they are often considered a huge tragedy for the Scottish people – especially It is the lament of the left to romanticize pre-clearance communities as proto-socialist utopias. Tsangari, and to some extent Crace, lean somewhat toward the latter view. The lack of historical markers or references to time or geography makes this nameless village the center of the world. harvest Enter a kind of Garden of Eden, where happy farmers sing as they cut their fields, then rejoice (perhaps a little too happily) with the local landowners at a harvest festival.

To its credit, the script doesn’t entirely harbor illusions about the good old days. Although the story is said to be narrated by Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones, mostly in accent), given the voiceover narration, when the community begins to wonder who started the conflagration that everyone comes together to At the beginning of the movie, the camera recorded the guilty expressions of a group of young people. Thirsk hurts his hand while fighting a fire on a horse belonging to Master Charles Kent (the mercurial Harry Melling). It has been suggested that Thirsk was slightly smarter than most of his neighbours, as he grew up with Kent and was taught to read and write. But he was also a somewhat passive boy, essentially an outsider, although he worked in the area for many years and was married to a local woman who is now deceased.

This might explain why he raised few objections when everyone tried to blame the fire on three strangers seen nearby. When they are arrested, the two men (Gary Maitland and Noor Dilan-Knight) are pillaged without even having a court hearing. The woman (played by Talisa Teixeira) was forcibly shaved off by villager Kitty Goss (played by Rosie McEwan).

This was just the first encounter with a stranger in what had been a very eventful week. Another newcomer is Philip Earle (Arinzee Kane), a cartographer with a distinctly non-Scottish accent who is hired by Master Kent to map the town and its surroundings. Since Thirsk’s injured hand was unable to perform more strenuous labor, he was seconded to help Earl, whom the villagers nicknamed “Quill.” Thirsk’s new duties included preparing parchments and identifying various landmarks in the area, few of which were given anything but the most generic names. (The lake, for example, was simply called “the loch.”) Earl welcomed the opportunity to play Adam in this Garden of Eden and began assigning new proper names to marshes, fields, and so on.

This doesn’t sit well with locals, who believe that to name or paint something is to define it in some way and therefore undermine it. Although this sounds very medieval and mystical, they are not entirely wrong. It turns out that Earl’s real employer is Edmund Jordan (Frank Dillane, from fear the walking deadwho took pleasure in playing pranks), a British aristocrat who somehow managed to make the pudding bowl hairstyle look sinister. Jordan was the only relative of Master Kent’s late wife and therefore the true heir to the estate, not Kent. He plans to introduce sheep farming on a large scale in classic Highland Clearance style, so inevitably things don’t end well. There will be several corpses at the end, including one killed in the most unusual way: drowning from someone urinating into his mouth, like a cross between waterboarding and golden showers.

The final scene is on the edge of being silly, and some viewers may find themselves giggling in ways that the filmmakers certainly didn’t expect. This impulse may arise elsewhere as well. The actors adopt a script style that is half recitative, half poetic, and end up sounding like stupid farmers from India. Monty Python and the Holy Grail Who can judge a man of noble birth just because he is not “covered in shit”? Part of the reason for this awkwardness may be that this is Tangali’s first English-language feature in more than two decades. Or maybe that’s intentional.

It was hard to know, like we didn’t quite know how we were going to cast Earl to be an educated black man at a time when that was almost a rarity, and to have two strangers, supposedly from several villages in the past, The people’s skin was much darker than the pale-skinned Scots in the village. Perhaps this is an allusion to Brexit and the racism that surfaces like the dregs of contemporary society in the UK and elsewhere. Despite these thorny issues, harvest Strong and tall, as strong as an oak tree. Filled with a sensual love for nature and a unique atmosphere, it’s as rich as a home-brew beer.