Harvest

Bluesky

As a film it's hard to identify a genre for Harvest. Elements of it recall works that verge on folk horror, tales like Kill List or Midsommar have elements in common. There are other, drastically different, tales of small communities upon which strange doom falls. Encanto at one extreme, The One Man Village at another.

If it were a book it would be 'literary fiction', something magical realist. Tucked into a genre that purports not to be a genre, one whose contradictions make it almost oxymoronic, like 'festival film' or 'fancy crisps'. That's not to make light of its quality, and indeed when I say 'if it were a book' it is. Jim Crace's novel of the same name has a narrator of sorts, Walter Thirsk. Caleb Landry Jones' made an early costume decision that unseats this work further in time, a pair of shoes that as much as wriggly tin on roofs unmoors the hillsides, inclines one to try to place this in a where and a when. The old rules apply, make walls, build a fire, and new rules will come. Those new rules are heralded by fire too, by walls.

By maps particularly, Arinze Kene's Mr Quill is making one, one mark of pen at a time, within the film turning a geography into something that can be held in other than the mind's eye. Walter will assist him, further complicating his status in a village that is better mapped as a series of relationships than properties. Walter with Master Kent (Harry Melling), with the widow Kitty Gosse (Rosy McEwan), with the stranger Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira), with his free-roaming pigs Gorge and George, with those who want to get along, with those who want to go, with those who want to give, and to give up.

Joslyn Barnes co-writes, another adaptation with a director to go with the triumphant Nickel Boys. Director Athina Rachel Tsanari has helmed several works before, including features, but I think this is an English language debut. It's a strong one, building on its sources dreamlike uncertainties to make something that is perhaps less abstract than distilled.

Textures abound, swimming across grass, the scrape of ink across prepared surfaces, the construction of inks from powders, the ruddy distortions of hallucination, the drove in dreamlike despair, ominous oneiric ovines, the grain of film, the wet grip of poultices. The sky is leaden not with cloud but with metaphor, the claims of capital and colonies and cults and companionship a headier brew than any humidity could hold. Rains and reigns and reins, as control is lost, sought, surrendered.

There are modifications from the book, of course, enough that even those familiar with a work shortlisted for the then Man Booker Prize will know the path but not the destination. The six works in that group have now a film adaptation (this), a TV miniseries and a stage play. Each medium has its tricks and habits and in those conjurings and clothes new folds and feelings are found. We see more on film than Walter did in print, have the things he elsewhere imagines made real, drowning in the grip of certainty when previous draughts had been supping upon supposition.

At times the discomfort that Harvest causes is not from dirt or despair but the room it leaves for interpretation. Mr Quill is making a map but everyone is drawing lines. The inhabitants of the village are penned in, otherwise occupied, repeatedly reaping what has been sown. While no budget can compete with imagination the anachronisms of production design are noticeable in ways that gaps in one's own perception are not. By changing how we see the settlement and what the influence of incomers precipitates we're given a different angle on the alchemy of a place, a population. It's a heady brew, one rooted in personal chemistries and performances.

"A village of enough" and "a settlement of plenty", a place where looking is not the same as knowing. A place where abundance is of detail, among the many credits production designer Nathan Parker's father Richard, to whom the map(s) can be attributed. The map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski observed, but books are not films either. They can show us the same things, allow us to understand relations, give us a sense of place in another medium.

It loses the first person of the book to differently focus upon Walter, still our protagonist and an anchor of our perception but we are not similarly certain of the things he knows and will know. Sean Price Williams as cinematographer is working with film and that Kodak crunch becomes another layer of abstraction and realism in an uneasy border between the two. The music includes use of prepared piano, and those uncanny strings are yet again a place where definite uncertainties are echoed. In each of these changes Harvest bears rich fruit. It may not be to everyone's taste, in places stranger than sweet, more bitter than brief, but for those with a zest for this sort of thing a bountiful bit of brilliance.

Source