At the start of Athina Rachel Tsangari’s “Harvest,” it’s not clear whether Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) is feral or just madly in love with the land. Clad in loose, roughly woven garments, he practically skips through the landscape, which is shot in lush and ruddy hues. He gnaws on one tree branch, then appears to make out with a knothole in another tree. He exults in the sunshine, strips off his clothes and glides through the water, every inch of his body open to the waves. He is one with nature, it would seem.
It’s only after this introduction that we come to find out who Walter is, and where we are. This is Scotland, near the dawn of the modern age, and Walter lives in a tiny village, far from anything resembling a real town. It’s so small that it doesn’t have a name. The handful of residents there farm the land, which belongs to Master Kent (Harry Melling), a kind and good man, if a bit of a weakling.
Walter once was Master Kent’s manservant and was raised from infancy as his best friend. But Walter fell in love with a girl in the village — and with the land on which she lived, down by the water. So he moved out of the big house and into one of the thatched ones, and though the xenophobic villagers distrust anyone who isn’t one of their own, he began the life of a farmer and slowly managed to become one of them.
But now his wife is gone. He has a transactional sort of relationship with a village widow named Kitty (Rosy McEwen), but for the most part he lives like a bachelor, and happily. When “Harvest” begins, though, that tranquillity is about to be ravaged. First there’s a fire. Then, a set of strangers show up in the village: three intruders with unknown intentions, and also a mapmaker (Arinzé Kene), hired by Master Kent to survey the land. With them they bring the outside world, and an uneasiness that only accelerates when a snobbish aristocrat (Frank Dillane) shows up.
“Harvest,” which takes place over one week’s time, is gorgeous and strange and a bit winding, though not unpleasantly so. It’s adapted by Tsangari and Joslyn Barnes from Jim Crace’s novel, with ample voice-over and a lot of thick Scottish accents — I saw it with subtitles. The cinematographer Sean Price Williams shot the movie on 16 mm, which lends it a textured, almost grubby feel at times, as if the film itself has come to us from the past and might disintegrate into dust.
Or maybe dirt. Or maybe it will melt into liquid, or burst into flames — “Harvest” is profoundly elemental, perhaps to mimic the way the villagers’ lives are close to the earth and the soil and the sea. They dance in the mud, burn in the sunshine, feast on the flesh of the pigs they have raised and deck themselves out for celebrations in clothing they’ve sewn. They walk through fields of golden wheat and trudge through marshes.
This life is not always idyllic or beautiful: If you wish to disrespect someone, you smear or drench them in bodily fluid. If you violate the rules, or if the village decides you have, you may be put in the stocks for the whole town as a lesson, and this may end very badly for you. The children of the village are brought to the stones that mark out its boundary every year and made to smack their heads hard onto their rough surfaces, to teach them where they belong.
It’s easy to romanticize this kind of life, but it’s obvious that it’s not always pleasant or comfortable. Yet it’s their life, the one they love. When the setting shifts to the big house and Master Kent’s world, it feels chilly and stale and inhuman by contrast, a place where no one has ever had a real emotion. The disparity is very much on purpose, because there is space for only one way of life in this world: “Harvest” is about the way that whole groups of people are displaced, their lives ruined, in the name of efficiency and profit.
That description makes it sound cold, clinical and didactic, though. It’s not. It is dreamy, hazy and phantasmic, vacillating between extreme beauty and something approaching folk horror. At times “Harvest” grows hallucinatory, villagers dancing around a fire while the sparks fly upward. You get the sense of centuries of ancestors lurking in the shadows behind them, watching as their descendants preserve their way of life. Until, of course, they can’t. Everything that is beautiful may be destroyed. Every seed planted may turn out to be futile. Perhaps the point is simply in the planting.
This film was screened at the 62nd New York Film Festival.
