While lesser known than her contemporary Yorgos Lanthimos, Greek filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari has played a large part in shaping the so-called “weird wave” that swept the country’s cinematic exports. Her international breakthroughs “Attenberg” and “Chevalier” highlighted the absurdity of social structures by having intrepid individuals flout taboos. Tsangari’s latest work, “Harvest,” approaches her central concern from the reverse angle, showing how the imposition of an artificial order fertilizes the soil to reap chaos.
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Tsangari might well be cinema’s ribald Rousseau, given her fascination with the fundamental tension of the social contract: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Working from a novel of the same name by Jim Crace, her film focuses on the fastening of those shackles rather than their undoing. While “Harvest” takes place in no particularly specified time or place, laws of enclosure establishing private property rights within the British Isles provide an animating tension. These concerns feel entirely contemporary as the European continent endures sustained fights over its borders.
For Tsangari, these lines proscribing ownership of land obliterate any sense of home. The development of these firm demarcations, as committed to the maps of cartographer Mr. Quill (Arinzé Kine), make for the closest thing “Harvest” has to a plot engine. There’s fire burning under the events, both metaphorically and literally, given the village faces a blaze of unknown origin at the outset that deepens distrust among residents. True in the film, just as it is in reality, the outsiders “not born with local soil under their fingernails,” like Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira), become the targets of suspicion.
Tsangari distills the conflict into a dichotomy between two leading men, each of whom fails to sort neatly into the given role expected of them. Walter (Caleb Landry Jones) and Kent (Harry Melling) grew up together, even though the former was the child of the latter’s wetnurse, and become widowers in the same season of their lives. A servant-master relationship never develops between them, though a differential in power does exist.
They locate simple solidarity in their lack of assimilation into their class group. Walter is too proximate to nobility for the working class, while Kent proves too salt-of-the-earth for his landed peers. The talents of both performers in these roles feel slightly underutilized, especially Jones, an actor who can channel the animalistic like few men this side of Joaquin Phoenix. Tsangari has them playing ideas distilled into flesh-and-blood men, although at least the strains of political thought they represent get fully fleshed out.
Walter and Kent’s dynamic is the only one that works in “Harvest.” Despite a village full of personalities, none of them manage to rise above being a stand-in for some idea or viewpoint in Tsangari’s allegory. A frenzied spate of their actions lands with a thud once Master Jordan (Frank Dillane), Kent’s cousin with a claim on the land, swoops in to demand the map-making process draw to a close. The further the story strays from Walter and Kent, the more it begins to collapse under the weight of its bloated story.
This may stem from an unsuccessful attempt to translate the narrative perspective of Crace’s text. On the page, “Harvest” comes from Walter’s point of view despite his lack of participation in the events he describes. In Tsangari’s adaptation, the protagonist, by necessity, must be more present. Piling abstraction on top of absurdity makes the figures on screen feel frustratingly nondescript and difficult to invest in.
The film’s lack of character development might not appear so evident were it not in such stark contrast with all the other elements of “Harvest.” The village is only nondescript in narrative terms. Visually, it presents highly specific details ranging from unique masks used in traditional ceremonies to a ritual where children bang their heads on a “boundary rock” to teach them “where they belong.” Cinematographer Sean Price Williams catches it all on a grainy film stock with a portion of the sprocket holes still showing, which lends the action a quality of real tactility.
“Harvest” manages to exist in a similar grey area to that occupied by its characters, albeit not in a particularly positive way. At two hours and change in runtime, it’s too lengthy to maintain an ambiguous or elemental edge to its allegorical sensibility. But based on what appears in the film, Tsangari’s inability to add dimensionality to characters hardly makes the case that Crace’s novel deserves the expanded duration of miniseries treatment.
The villagers cry out, “You’ve flattened us,” when Master Jordan’s authorities impose the borders of Quill’s map on them. They might say the same thing if they saw the movie about themselves. [C]
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