The story of agriculture really is the story of humanity’s progress in a nutshell. It shows us how we’ve decided to position ourselves against the natural world, adopting a model of exploitation over collaboration. But as with any other facet of human progress, some modes are more exploitative than others.
Harvest, loyally adapted from the Jim Crace novel of the same name by Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari, dramatises the final days of an unnamed medieval village somewhere in what would later become the United Kingdom, just as its established way of life is set to fade as the result of a returning landowner, Master Jordan (Frank Dillane) seeking to impose an inclosure so as to render the land more profitable. Business as usual for the likes of him — whose claim to the village and its surrounding fields is ratified by a family connection — his cousin, dead for some years, used to be wife to Master Charles Kent (Harry Melling), given stewardship of the village and its denizens, which charge he takes on with a degree of laxity that is alien to the needs of Jordan and his flattening hand; said flattening aided by the arrival of a map-maker Philip Earle (Arinzé Kene) nicknamed ‘Mr Quill’ by the villagers by dint of his professional tool of choice.
But in actual fact — and fully in line with the source material — our story is told from the point of view of Walter Thirsk (Caleb Landry Jones), and it starts rolling not with the arrival of Jordan but with a far more internal rupture to the insular and fragile ecosystem of the village. A few nights shy of the conclusion of the autumn harvest, Master Kent’s barn is set on fire, resulting in the massacre of the man’s white doves. When no suspects come forward, the community makes a convenient scapegoat for three outsiders – placing the two men among their number in the pillory while the woman, dubbed Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira) has her hair sheared and is left to make her own way as an outcast.
A liminal figure who only married into the village after arriving there as Kent’s manservant, Thirsk is now also a widower and, having injured his hand while tending to the conflagration that took Kent’s doves, sits most of the action of the book — and the film — through, observing from the sidelines and never quite picking a side as tensions escalate.
This makes him both an ideal and maddening way in for the audience, and the gimlet-eyed Landry Jones is an ideal bit of casting here. Watching him is like biting into a green apple: a shiny exterior with bitter notes, yet you still keep munching. It’s an adequate enough metaphor for the film itself, and not just because the many horses and pigs that supplement the human cast are seen munching on the things all throughout.
Sean Price Williams’s cinematography is gorgeous in its griminess — never bereft of poetry but picking apposite earth tones to shoot this world gone by. This is a wild natural world — in service to its human inhabitants, yes, but not nearly to the extent that we’re used to. And for all that some concessions for modern audiences are made — particularly when it comes to the unapologetically anachronistic dialogue — this is a world that truly feels lived in, by hardened peasantry with an intimate knowledge of the elements and no qualms about their fallout.
Clearly made possible only as a result of an impressively coordinated co-production operation — the opening credits are almost comical in their interminable tumble of mandatory callouts to the collaborating studios and funding bodies that pitched in to make this a high-end product of contemporary European cinema– Harvest is hardly obscure or laborious, however.
While its runtime is on the generous side — clocking in at a total of 134 minutes — its narrative progresses with a quietly churning, somber inevitability. There’s a familiar gossipy frisson to the village social dynamic which is irresistible to latch onto, particularly for us denizens of a similarly tiny nation whose natural landscape is consistently threatened by the encroaching hand of profit. And when Jordan and his men ride into town to decide its fate — though really and truly, the die’s been cast a long time ago — they do so in black garb and black hats to match: classic getup for the usurping villains in a Western. Going along with the rules of that genre, we’d be tempted to think that this tale comes generously populated with disgruntled outsiders who would be ready to send the baddies packing. But for better or worse, neither Crace nor Tsingari are telling that kind of story. This isn’t A Fistful of Dollars, much less Seven Samurai – and is, unsurprisingly, all the better for it. Thirsk is not a hero; he is an everyman caught between two worlds, who gains our respect not because he is exceptional but because he is a keen, shrewd observer of events.
Still, for all the frankness of their portrayal, our characters do not come richly endowed with tortured psychological complexity. This is all by design, though. When I interviewed Jim Crace on one of his two professional visits to Malta back in 2014 – a year or so after Harvest had hit the shelves and while the author was serving a short stint as Writer in Residence at the University of Malta – he confessed to being very much a ‘schematic’ writer, who constructs his narratives by leaning into the inevitable logic of an idea-based narrative framework and populating it with archetypal characters that will not muddy the water of the lurching churn too much.
It’s no surprise that a story like Harvest sprung from his brain, then. The encroaching tide of capitalism surpassing the previously unquestionable.
Harvest was screened at Spazju Kreattiv Cinema, Valletta. It is currently available to watch on Mubi.
