Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Match Factory, Venice film festival
In Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Harvest, a Scottish villager and farmer named Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) takes a visitor and mapmaker named Mr. Quill (Arinzé Kene) for a walk around the grounds that surround their land. On a verdant hillside, the two sit and muse about the sky, the trees. We are sometime in the past — when, exactly, is (deliberately) hard to say. A group of children led by a teacher bound up the hill beside them and then one by one, the teacher instructs the children to throw their head against a rock. This is the boundary stone of their world. The children learn at a young age they are tethered to the land through pain. It is violent, but necessary — and also, admittedly, a little funny.
Playing alongside Harvest in this year’s New York Film Festival is Dea Kulumbegashvili’s April, a Vera Drake–style story for modern times about an OB/GYN named Nina (Ia Sukhitashvili) in Eastern Georgia who divides her time between the sterile, imposing wings of her hospital workplace, where she is under investigation after a birth goes wrong, and the grassy wild of the mountain villages, where she travels to perform illegal abortions for those who need them. Though she has no rock to knock her head upon, it’s clear that Nina does not belong in the rural parts of her native country. The threat of violence and the power of nature itself (deafening thunderstorms, imposing darkness) haunt each drive out to the mountains.
These films both feel epic in scope, perhaps because of the wild nature of the landscapes they inhabit, though they both take place within the timespan of just a single week. For Walter and Nina, characters who straddle the physical borders of where they live as well as the metaphysical borders of their place in society, these weeks are quite possibly the worst of their lives, upending all that they know and do to define who they are.
In Harvest, Walter dangles over the precipice of modernity, and most crucially, capitalism. While his nameless village feels as though it’s been around as long as time itself — their feudal lord, Master Kent (Harry Melling), is not so much “in charge” as he is “just around” — the encroaching corporate(-ish) takeover they face threatens their way of life entirely. Walter has long been able to go back and forth between the village and Kent’s manor; the two men grew up together, and though their social standings are different, they still talk and laugh like old friends. Unlike his peers in the village, Walter is literate — eager to learn and absorb all that Mr. Quill brings with his mapmaking supplies and art materials. But to others, a mapmaker on their grounds portends apocalypse; to name things is to destroy them, these people believe. And soon Master Kent’s cousin-in-law rolls up, guns and horses blazing, ready to turn the land into grazing terrain with little room for villagers, let alone society.
That only a week has passed in April plays like a wry joke: Can anyone imagine a single week going as badly as it has for Nina? Her world has already descended into the horrors of individualism, where there is no community. While Walter’s traditional village represents an archaic and beautiful (though flawed) way of living, Nina’s sojourns into the mountains are like time-traveling to a worse, more restrictive way of life. She bucks up against retrograde views on abortion and women’s bodily autonomy (perhaps also a symptom of modern living). She treats a young patient who is deaf-mute, pregnant against her will, and living in fear of the consequences should the man of the household find out. Her off-the-clock work may threaten her career, but when her colleague and ex-boyfriend David (Kakha Kintsurashvili) asks why she does this, Nina insists that if she doesn’t, someone will. It might as well be her.
The walls close in on Walter and Nina. Their routines have long endured on the fringes of their worlds, with Nina driving back and forth from her plain, modern life and the wilds of the mountain villages and Walter’s sometimes agrarian, sometimes intellectual upbringing. We all have bad weeks. The weeks depicted in these films, however, are ruining not only individual lives, but entire ways of life. To break beyond the bounds of how one is expected to live — to push against tradition, or worse, to embrace it — can shatter a person’s life. These two films feel local in narrative and profoundly elemental in feel and sound. Both Harvest and April make space within the walls of the frame for the natural world to open up: for grass to rustle, for the sky to open, for mud to bubble and slap and sully all that is precious and may never again be so clean.
