HARVEST – Review by Liz Braun
Harvest is an intriguing film about class, land and the human condition.
That sounds like a lot. It is a lot.
Director Athina Rachel Tsangari drops a viewer into a vaguely defined time and place, an agrarian village with medieval properties but a rusticity at odds with other, modern details — the inhabitants’ speech patterns, for example, or the fabrics chosen for their clothing. People speak with a Scot’s accent and the overall action, such as it is, involves wealthy landowners, put-upon farmers and talk of changing land use to sheep rearing; figure late 18th century and the Highland Clearances in Scotland.
Based on the novel by Jim Crace, Harvest begins with the solitary figure of Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones) as he moves through the countryside and walks the wheat fields, checking out moss on a tree and swimming happily in a lake.
He is then part of a rescue effort at a suspicious barn fire. During the firefighting by villagers there is mention of Master Kent (Harry Melling), as his horse is rescued from the fire; not long afterward we learn that despite social differences, Walter and Kent grew up together, Walter’s mother being in service to the landowner’s family. That puts our man Walter somewhere in between the regular folk and the gentry and points to his essentially isolated state. Like Master Kent, he is a widower.
An outsider appears in the person of Mr. Earle (Arinze Kene), an educated man and a mapmaker. He is busy drawing a map of the area where the village lies. The history of maps and fences being what it is, this is the first faint note of change, and perhaps trouble.
As Mr. Earle happily shows people what he’s drawing — their fields, their lake, their woods and even themselves — there is a hubbub nearby and the whole village races off. Seems more strangers have washed up nearby. This is convenient, as the villagers are looking for someone to blame for the barn fire. The three strangers are accused of setting the fire and dealt with immediately: the two men locked into the pillory for a week and the woman shorn of her hair.
The fear and loathing toward outsiders evident among the locals gives way to a harvest celebration, with food, drink and wild abandon-type dancing. In the midst of the feasting, Master Kent turns up and talks about a dream he’s had, where all the villagers are tucked up safe at home, weaving cloth from sheep’s wool, rather than toiling in the fields.
Uh, oh.
After that and the drunken bacchanal of the harvesting party, the film gets increasingly dark. Master Kent and Walter both prove to be well-meaning but ineffectual as life in the village begins to get dismantled. For starters, Master Kent is not the true landowner — it’s his wife’s cousin, Master Jordan (Frank Dillane), who, unlike Master Kent, doesn’t even pretend to have anything in common with the common people. Master Jordan intends to switch the land’s use from crops to sheep pasture, and lets the people know their farm labour will no longer be required. Thereafter, a horse is killed, the village is ransacked, and people start dying. Those still standing pack up and move elsewhere.
Harvest concerns villagers living in a beneficially communal fashion until forced out of their ancestral land by those more interested in profit than people. It doesn’t seem necessary to spell out the contemporary political and environmental parallels; the filmmaker has dedicated Harvest to her grandparents, whose former farm in Greece is now a highway.
The film is slow and strange and, thanks to cinematographer Sean Price Williams, hypnotic to look at. The camera lingers on the flora and fauna of the countryside, stopping to show the glory of a harvest moon or a spider’s web and generally celebrating the natural world; the humans — cruel, stunned, lemming-like — don’t come off quite so well.
Walter worries out loud about the villagers. The landowners may be heartless, but the locals seem sort of brainless, oblivious about what’s happening to their lives. It’s impossible to say how much of Scottish history Tsangari is referencing here, but the Clearances created social, cultural and economic issues that are still being felt today. Ridding the Highlands of “inferior” Celtish residents sometimes involved forced removal, with people rounded up, bound hand and foot and shipped off to the wilds of North America. Can you imagine.
Harvest had its North American debut at TIFF 2024.
