In the Flesh: Harvest

With her camera, director Athina Rachel Tsangari makes love to the Scottish countryside with the same pagan verve as her protagonist, Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), in the film’s opening sequence. A knothole in a dogwood tree becomes a crotch to tongue and finger. Walter’s dirty fingers mold and shape dark soil mixed with his own urine. He runs his thumb along a blade of grass. Later he will watch the cartographer, Quill (Arinzé Kene), mix insect wings and dried herbs into pigment with the same hungry reverence for nature’s sensual qualities, not realizing that the end of his village rests in the mapmaker’s humble mortar. The map Quill draws is the beginning of the brutal process of Enclosure, the seizure of common land and the prohibition of commoners’ right to farm and hunt there. Toward the end of the film, Walter refers to the planting season as a promise that Spring will come, and its passing by unmarked as a tacit acceptance of the end of life. 

“No scratch of wool next to your skin,” the widow Kitty Gosse (Rosy McEwen) whispers in Walter’s ear as he adjusts the tunic she’s woven him as a gift. With every choice the film’s characters make, they bound and restrict their world, alter their experiences, name themselves and the sensations they experience. This is done, in the village, with love, for purposes of exploration and survival, to learn, to make. Tsangari depicts the daily work of subsistence farming with a deep sensuality, not romanticizing the backbreaking toil, small-town rivalries and grudges, or class hierarchy, but capturing the pastoral beauty in an earthy, grubby way that makes it impossible not to imagine walking through the fields of this nameless village, inhaling the smells of its turned earth, its midden, its roaming chickens. It’s impossible not to feel the cool roughness of lichen-spotted stone, or hear the whir of dragonflies skimming low over still water.

Beneath the gorgeous flicker of the film grain, though, beneath Tsangari’s evident love for her setting and respect for the historical people who inhabited it, the seeds of the village’s own destruction have already been sown. Resentment. Ignorance. Punitive clannishness. The endless process of scapegoating and corresponding apathy toward real threats. A beaten-down inability to organize or exercise power. It’s easy for the revolting proto-capitalist Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) to ride into town and simply uproot the entire population, to replace them with sheep, to indefinitely defer the planting’s promise of another Spring. He makes a sick spectacle of the quaint childhood ritual of bumping children’s heads against the town’s border stones to show them the bounds of their world. The ties that bind can also hang. The naming and making of the world can end it.