Harvest

Original title: Harvest

Directed by: Athina Rachel Tsangari

Country: UK/Greece

Length: 130 min.

Year: 2024

Premiere: Venice Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: a community of farmers see their life overturned when a mysterious cartographer starts mapping their land.

RATING: 2.5/5

REVIEW

With a filmmaker like Athina Rachel Tsangari, it is a given that the feature will be something odd, hard to interpret along the common lines of cinema. There is however a bare minimum that is required.

The premise of a remote village that gets engulfed in the capitalisation system during the years of the enclosures in rural britain makes for a compelling premise, especially if united with a potentially surreal and experimental approach. Harvest however chooses a decontextualisation, that runs so deep as to make it almost impossible to detect a context. There is a perception of achronism that is implicated throught the contrasting costumes of the peasants and the newly arrived landowners, that have an evident discrepancy of centuries, but even such an approach is not sufficiently deepened. 

Constantly, the film introduces a theme or aspect and in most cases, it does not get further. The paganist traditions of the farmer collective are barely scratched, the idea that the 'land' is somehow in an outerwordly realm is very distantly implied, the meaning, way too mise-en-abyme to be properly detected even with a considerable cultural baggage. 

The almost abscence of a clear cut storyline makes it very hard to be engaged by Harvest. Aside from the role of Caleb Landry Jones, no character has sufficient depth or peculiarity to truly be properly distinguished, no matter the efforts of the notable cast. If, in the first hour, this abscence of clarity builds a sense of mystery, the more the film proceeds, the more it becomes clear that it leads nowhere. 

There is a strong philosophical ground to Harvest: the act of "naming objects" in order to make them existent has a heidegerrian root, which is subverted in this film by actually causing a collateral destruction of these same objects. As soon as plants, natural features, places become part of the cartographer's map, they are compromised, endangered. This concept is perhaps the only aspect of Harvest that manages to keep some sort of drive, even if insufficient.

Harvest is sure beautiful to look at, and a film that has a sort of intentionality, though it is also a work that gets caught up in its own approach, on a trope that has been done better by films like Sátántangó or Dogville.