Before the sight or sound of any human in Mark Jenkin’s “Rose of Nevada,” there is rust. The scarlet-tinted stain vividly consumes old iron maritime equipment, telling a story in its stillness about how the metal has weathered the ravages of time.
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Save a prominent red cap passed between seamen in the film, no such red streaks mark the humans in “Rose of Nevada.” This opening montage casts an ironic shadow given the way Jenkin’s narrative unmoors its characters from a strictly linear flow of time. People don’t rust, but a fantastical twist of fate allows George MacKay’s Nick Dyer to demonstrate the passage of the years.
This unexpected return of the titular fishing boat instigates his journey. Before Nick’s birth, the ship and its crew disappeared, taking the spirit of a fishing community of Cornwall, the southernmost county in England, with it. Jenkin, in his capacity as editor (on top of serving as director, writer, cinematographer, sound designer, and composer), literalizes the connection of Nick’s present woes to this village-wide loss of innocence with provocative parallel edits and match cuts.
Risking the doom foretold by some who remember the original ill-fated trip, Nick joins the Rose of Nevada’s new crew alongside Liam (Callum Turner) in an attempt to restore the town’s glory days. The two men find renewed purpose out on the open water, which Jenkin portrays with such visceral power that it could induce seasickness in the audience. They locate a calling that’s missing from their home life, but their attempt to secure the future by returning to the past becomes more than just a political philosophy for them. Once on shore, they find that the villagers greet them as if they were the original crew.
Before swarming the audience with immediate signifiers that the men have arrived in 1993, Jenkin lets the disorientation play out in MacKay’s face as the character takes in his revitalized surroundings. The once-ambivalent Nick now becomes a man of action at just the moment when it becomes unclear how exactly he can get back to the future. This approach to the metaphysical twist in “Rose of Nevada” is admirably subtle, yet Jenkin gets tripped up on some of the finer points of mechanics.
The Cornish filmmaker’s prior work, “Enys Men,” played similarly fast and loose with the logic of time. But that project, rooted squarely in the subjective headspace of a lone wildlife volunteer who gradually loses touch with reality, could lean on its folk horror trappings and coast on ominous vibes. “Rose of Nevada” operates closer to pure fantasy, which operates under firmer rules and logic. It gets a bit convoluted to figure out some of the finer points of the story, particularly when it involves how Nick and Liam relate to the villagers, given everyone’s taciturn disposition.
The film still represents an undeniable levelling up for Jenkin, whose avant-garde genre stylings made his previous two features into beloved cult curios. It’s great to see a true original with local Cornish flair committed to making movies set in his hometown, even as he recruits bigger-ticket stars like MacKay and Turner in front of the camera. Jenkin jokes that his SLDG 13 manifesto was more a way to keep him from going bankrupt than a vow of aesthetic purity. However, his larger-scale effort in “Rose of Nevada” shows he’s held fast to the overarching principles, if not obeyed all the dogma. (In fairness to Jenkin, the thirteenth and final rule is to break one of the previous twelve rules.)
Having additional resources enables Jenkin to sprawl the beauty and brutality of his home across an even larger canvas, both visually and sonically. His heightened saturation of colors, particularly the pervasive reds that pervade the film, goes a long way in establishing an atmosphere where such a rupture in time is plausible. And there’s simply no one else operating at the level of Jenkin when it comes to intentional sound design. With his intentionality in building an aural landscape from scratch and only adding elements he wants the audience to hear, Jenkin orchestrates a masterful symphony for the ears.
But the narrative device Jenkin chooses to convey his poignant message about rediscovering the true meaning of “it takes a village” requires him to operate in a more concrete realm. Making meaning out of Nick’s fantastic voyage toward the present requires him to clear up some of the movie’s mysteries rather than letting them continue to float nebulously. It’s a bit of a bumpy ride in “Rose of Nevada” as the abstractions of his technique bristle against the demands of the storytelling to balance various story elements (not to mention an ensemble cast).
The general thematic thrust in “Rose of Nevada” is ultimately strong enough to overcome some of its plodding plotting. The tactility of Jenkin’s technique, too, also helps nudge the film over into being a more enjoyable and rewarding experience than a frustrating or head-scratching one. Hopefully, some of the growing pains dissipate for the Renaissance man of Cornwall’s next big-screen outing. If experience is any indication, Jenkin is unlikely to gather rust. [B-]
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New York-based freelance journalist whose writing appears regularly on Decider, Slant, Slashfilm, and The Playlist, covering film with a focus on cultural context.
