Film reviews: Harvest is a starkly-shot eulogy for an old world
Harvest
- Harvest
- ★★★★☆
- Cinema release
The sheaves are being brought in as Harvest (18s) opens, and the villagers of a tiny medieval commune nestled in “fields far from anywhere” are preparing to celebrate.
But just as the feasting commences, Master Kent (Harry Melling) unveils his big idea: That instead of simply subsisting from year to year, the villagers should abandon agriculture and focus their combined efforts on rearing sheep and providing woollen garments for the well-to-do in the distant cities.
Walter (Caleb Landry Jones) hears in the suggestion the death knell for his community and their way of life; and when the landowner Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) arrives to enforce the new dispensation with a handful of paid thugs in tow, the scene is set for a culture clash that erupts into vicious violence.
Adapted from Jim Crace’s novel, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013, and directed by Athina Rachel Tsangari, Harvest is a fever-dream interpretation of the collision between incipient capitalism and the agrarian culture that has served the villagers for countless generations.
Walter’s is a tough life of hand-to-mouth existence and self-regulating justice — a pair of interlopers, accused of burning Master Kent’s barn, are summarily consigned to a week in the stocks on the master’s orders — but Master Jordan’s alternative will render all but a handful of villagers homeless and doomed to starve.
It’s a stark choice, and Tsangari doesn’t pretend that the villagers’ lives are idyllic: Shot in relentlessly muted colours by cinematographer Sean Price Williams, the village is a grimly muddy, weed-ridden shambles, their behaviour crude and brutal.
Caleb Landry Jones is terrific as Walter, his voiceover monologues delivering a primitive poetry eulogising the natural world, and he gets excellent support from Harry Melling as the well-intentioned but morally weak Master Kent, and Frank Dillane as the creepily oleaginous villain Master Jordan.
- Friendship
- ★★★☆☆
- Cinema release
Friendship (15A) stars Tim Robinson as Craig, a socially awkward app developer who strikes up a rapport with his new neighbour Austin (Paul Rudd), a weather reporter on local TV.
Introduced to Austin’s friends, Craig suddenly finds himself part of a buddy network for the first time — until he oversteps the mark at a party and finds himself excluded. Can the emotionally vulnerable Craig winkle his way back into Austin’s good books?
Written and directed by Andrew DeYoung, Friendship is either a masterpiece of narrative dissonance or a poorly scripted vehicle for Robinson’s comedy schtick.
The tone veers back and forth from the cringe comedy of Craig’s inappropriate behaviour into something a little darker, as the painfully self-aware Craig, who seems to be operating without any kind of social filter, makes Herculean efforts to behave according to societal norms.
It’s funny, certainly, and particularly when it comes to Craig’s blurted non sequiturs (Robinson’s comic timing is to die for); but there’s also an uncomfortable sense that we are supposed to be laughing at Craig’s inability to connect, rather than at those who ridicule his behaviour.
- Four Letters of Love
- ★★☆☆☆
- Cinema release
Set in Ireland in the 1970s, and adapted by Niall Williams from his own novel, Four Letters of Love (12A) stars Fionn O’Shea as Nicholas and Ann Skelly as Isabel, star-crossed teenage lovers who are destined to meet and embark on a life-long romance.
Chance encounters and divine intervention play their part in bringing together and/or thwarting the young couple; also aiding and abetting are Nicholas’s artist father William (Pierce Brosnan) and Isabel’s poet father Muiris (Gabriel Byrne), who are married to Bette (Imelda May), and Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), respectively.
Director Polly Steele employs a narrative framing device that involves the older Nicholas, now a writer, telling the story of Nicholas and Isabel — which accounts for the characters’ excessively florid dialogue; the script itself is a mish-mash of Oirish clichés that wastes a very fine cast.
