Venice 2024: Harvest
A village awakens to two columns of smoke: one heralds a beginning, foreigners come to establish a new home; the other signals an end, as the lord’s dove coop burns brightly while the villagers rally to tame the flames. So begins Harvest, Athina Rachel Tsangari’s latest, presented in competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival, based on Jim Crace’s novel by the same name.
A remote village completely cut off from the outside world in an undefined time and place. Two childhood friends – lord of the manor Charles Kent (Harry Melling) and his right-hand-turned-farmer Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry-Jones). Three foreigners, each contributing to setting in motion a series of events which will forever disrupt the villagers’ lives. Such are the key elements combining to create an allegorical and layered film in which silences often carry more weight than words.
Harvest could almost be a fable, its dreamlike quality rendered sharply by the decision to shoot this on 16mm film, each shot symbolic and rich in metaphors ripe for further reflection and interpretations. But dreams can easily turn into nightmares, and this is precisely what happens to this village during harvest season as the audience witnesses the small community’s slow descent into conflict which will bring about their own annihilation.
The theme of belonging is central to the film, and Walter Thirsk is the perfect guide through this journey as he is simultaneously a member of the community and an outsider, a traveller who stayed but can never fully be accepted as he was “not born with local soil under their fingernails”. Yet, he is also markedly different from the true foreigners who, as is often the case, are immediately looked upon with suspicion and used as easy scapegoats when things go wrong. During the press conference, Tsangari said she wanted to make a film about “a man who does nothing”, and Landry-Jones perfectly conveys this sense of inaction, a man who is defined more by what he is not than by what he is, paralysed when faced with change and unable to intervene in any way – for ill or good alike.
Differences in power also play a key role, as the hostile treatment reserved to the poorer foreigners, like the woman nicknamed “Mistress Beldam” (Thalissa Teixeira), is not the same as that offered to the rich Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) – Kent’s cousin who realises he has a claim to the village and arrives to take possession of it – despite the fact that the latter’s actions bring far more harm to the villagers than the former. Here the film weaves in another key theme: that of modernity and profit-seeking which, however, feels only roughly outlined rather than properly explored.
Far more interesting are the considerations assigned to Mr. Quill (a great Arinzé Kene), a chart maker hired to map the village and its borders, who becomes a stand-in for the author/filmmaker. Although he engages in the seemingly neutral exercise of his craft, his work is co-opted by those in power to support their plans. Quill is accused by the villagers of not understanding and “flattening” them as well as being the cause of all their ills, sparking debate over an artist’s responsibility for the ways in which their work is used.
The reflective level is that on which Harvest works best, images and music coming together to create the perfect atmosphere to breed contemplation. However, on a purely narrative level it still leaves something to be desired, the contrast felt all the more sharply due to its relaxed pace. Aside from a few characters (notably Walter’s relationships with Charles and Quill), the personal dynamics appear devoid of substance, with characters seeming to represent ideal types more than fully fleshed out individuals. Even though the film affords a slightly greater space to the women compared to the novel, they too feel underdeveloped and underutilised, Mistress Beldam and the widow Kitty Gosse (Rosy McEwen) particularly leaving a sense of dissatisfaction at the wasted potential for characters and performers alike. Still, Harvest is one of the highlights of this year’s rather forgettable competition line-up, a cinematic experience that channels Malick and last year’s underrated The Promised Land.