Review by Beatrice On 04-Sep-2024
On a circle, every point of beginning can also be a point of end.
Scotland, Middle Ages.
A man roams the fields, coming into contact with insects, animals, nature, and the waters with which he merges sexually, as if in an amniotic fluid.
A community managed by a benevolent and humane master, Lord Kent, who was raised alongside Walter, a farmer in the community, the film's narrator, a conscious observer, steeped in nature and gifted with conciliation, incapable of any form of violence. While the villagers do not like strangers and put them in the stocks, they do not know that they will soon be deprived of their natural rights and will have to begin a recovery journey, already lost from the start: simply the beginning of the loss.
An expert is called to map the territory, establish boundaries and properties, assign names and meanings, catalog names and plants, and establish an irreversible logistical language.
A new master is coming, a new reality is emerging.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
For the Greek director Athina Tsangari, producer of the first two films by Lanthimos, this is a return to Venice, after her second film Attenberg.
Her fourth work—based on the 2013 eponymous novel by Jim Crace—is set in a remote village in the English countryside at the end of the 16th century, on the eve of the agricultural revolution, when lands that were once communal property passed under the legal control of landowners, and it tells the villagers' reaction to three newcomers, who become scapegoats in a time of economic turmoil.
The English parliament enacted the Enclosure Acts, laws on the fencing of fields and common lands belonging to smallholders, effectively benefiting large landowners.
With this adaptation of Jim Crace's novel Harvest, the director says, we had the opportunity to examine the moment when it all began for us, who in the 21st century are heirs to a universal history of land loss. For me, Harvest is a film about reckoning. What have we done? In what direction are we heading? How can we save the soil, the self within the commons? Harvest takes place in a liminal world and illustrates the first cracks of the "industrial" revolution. Which was not a revolution. An agricultural community is disrupted by three types of outsiders: the cartographer, the migrant, and the businessman, all archetypes of unsettling changes.
The future is not part of the story: it will happen off-screen, in a world we are not destined to see. There are no heroes. Only ordinary and imperfect people. I imagined it as a daguerreotype, or its modern equivalent, a Polaroid slowly exposed at dusk.
Mystery, rituals, ceremonies, Bacchic/Dionysian dances, lysergic mushrooms, fire, salvation, and destruction, hunger.
Wheat is harvested with a sickle, a harbinger of death, of the end.
Here is the Harvest that is alluded to...
A humanity apparently in struggle, though supine, cowardly, and craven.
It is the people who subject themselves, who cut their own throats, and, being able to choose between being a servant and being free, leave freedom and take the yoke; who consent to their own harm, or rather pursue it.
A film about power, oppression, the dawn of capitalism, the human inability to resist and fight, about the common good and private property.
A film, The film about the beginning of the end of the world.
When abuses are met with submission, the usurping power quickly turns them into law.
04-Sep-2024 by Beatrice