9. A Field in England (2013), dir. Ben Wheatley
I watched this last night, via a recording which had been waiting around on my Sky box for a good couple of years. It's certainly a very strange film, operating on a level a long way removed from realism. Magic is real; people die and come back to life; someone is seemingly pulled into existence in the field by the other characters hauling on a massive rope; characters experience all kinds of hallucinations, etc. It's hard to say in what sense any of what we see on screen 'happens' in any normal narrative sense, and we're clearly at liberty to interpret it in our own way.
One possible way of approaching it seems to be to read the whole thing as a hallucination experienced by Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), the first character we meet and the main one whose perspective we follow throughout, as he dies in a hedgerow after trying to escape the commander he is seen fleeing from at the beginning. Seen from this angle, the whole story is about his unresolved issues playing out: his awareness of his bookish unworldliness and how this compares with the civil war soldiers; his guilt about his failure to track down the books which O'Neill stole from the alchemist he serves; his anxieties about his own abilities with magic. When Whitehead passes back out of the field at the end and meets Jacob and Friend, the companions whom he had bonded with there but had also failed to save and buried in the ground, that is basically him passing through into the afterlife, his issues now resolved.
Another possibility is that we should take seriously O’Neill (Michael Smiley)'s claim that he has summoned the others into the field to do his bidding, making him the main driver of the story. He is the rival alchemist who stole Whitehead's master's books, and seems to need Whitehead's magical abilities to complement his own, Jacob and Friend for their physical labour (pulling him back from whatever strange realm he had gone to on the end of his rope, digging for the treasure he believes is hidden in the field) and Cutler to serve him. On this level, the field is a magical otherworld in which the characters' experiences, including death, don't have lasting real-world consequences, and from which Whitehead, Jacob and Friend are all eventually able to escape by helping each other and overcoming O'Neill.
Or maybe even both of those are too much the work of a modern rationalising mind-set, and we should accept the whole thing as a Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell-ish narrative in which magic is just fully part of the reality of everyday life. Meanwhile, once we've assimilated that aspect of the film, there are all sorts of other things going on. With only five real characters in the story (plus the commander Whitehead escapes at the beginning), a lot of the drama comes from drawing each of them as individuals and in contrast to one another. There are particularly strong class distinctions between the two alchemists (Whitehead and O'Neill) and the other three who are ordinary labourers / soldiers / servants, as well as the obvious moral distinction between the exploitative and violent Cutler and O'Neill and the basically good if in some cases crude Jacob, Friend and Whitehead.
Although the whole story takes place in the field, and thus away from the world beyond, it also captures in microcosm in all sorts of ways the wider context of the seventeenth century and the civil war which the characters have stepped out of. Though three of the characters are veterans and / or deserters from the war, it's never entirely clear from what side, and this is probably the point - that it hardly matters, but that England is riven with all sorts of tensions and fault-lines anyway which come out in these characters' own rivalries. It's a world where society is fractured and you can't be sure who you can trust; in which magic and religion co-exist, but that religion may come in the form of simple faith, complex theology or cynicism; where bodily needs and discomforts are pressing and science is advanced enough to deliver death at the end of a musket but there is nothing much beyond herbs and superstition to stave off disease.
It's also a very visually-striking film. It's shot in black and white, entirely in the titular field. This (plus the small cast) is partly about working on a low budget, but it's a shining example of making constraint into a virtue, with lots of great wide shots of the characters walking through the long ripe grass, their dark clothes silhouetted against its pale yellow(?). Periodically, the characters also hold still in exaggerated stances, pointing at key props or features in the landscape, as though posing for the paintings and engravings which are the only visual medium through which we can directly encounter seventeenth-century England. And of course there are lots of great special effects conveying magic and / or hallucinations, culminating in a particularly trippy sequence of violent winds, flashing cross-cut images and split screens when Whitehead deliberately eats the mushrooms which populate the field and engages in a magical battle with O'Neill.
There are literally no female characters in the film at all, but I think I am OK with that, a) because it deals with a small group of refugees from a civil war battle raging off-screen at the beginning of the story, so those people are inevitably going to be men, and b) because there were clearly plenty of women in prominent positions within the production team, including the script-writer and lead producer. That said, I would definitely love to see a film which offered the surreality, visual aesthetic, and feel for the social and historical context of the seventeenth century which this one did, but was also strongly or even wholly focused on female characters.
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One possible way of approaching it seems to be to read the whole thing as a hallucination experienced by Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith), the first character we meet and the main one whose perspective we follow throughout, as he dies in a hedgerow after trying to escape the commander he is seen fleeing from at the beginning. Seen from this angle, the whole story is about his unresolved issues playing out: his awareness of his bookish unworldliness and how this compares with the civil war soldiers; his guilt about his failure to track down the books which O'Neill stole from the alchemist he serves; his anxieties about his own abilities with magic. When Whitehead passes back out of the field at the end and meets Jacob and Friend, the companions whom he had bonded with there but had also failed to save and buried in the ground, that is basically him passing through into the afterlife, his issues now resolved.
Another possibility is that we should take seriously O’Neill (Michael Smiley)'s claim that he has summoned the others into the field to do his bidding, making him the main driver of the story. He is the rival alchemist who stole Whitehead's master's books, and seems to need Whitehead's magical abilities to complement his own, Jacob and Friend for their physical labour (pulling him back from whatever strange realm he had gone to on the end of his rope, digging for the treasure he believes is hidden in the field) and Cutler to serve him. On this level, the field is a magical otherworld in which the characters' experiences, including death, don't have lasting real-world consequences, and from which Whitehead, Jacob and Friend are all eventually able to escape by helping each other and overcoming O'Neill.
Or maybe even both of those are too much the work of a modern rationalising mind-set, and we should accept the whole thing as a Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell-ish narrative in which magic is just fully part of the reality of everyday life. Meanwhile, once we've assimilated that aspect of the film, there are all sorts of other things going on. With only five real characters in the story (plus the commander Whitehead escapes at the beginning), a lot of the drama comes from drawing each of them as individuals and in contrast to one another. There are particularly strong class distinctions between the two alchemists (Whitehead and O'Neill) and the other three who are ordinary labourers / soldiers / servants, as well as the obvious moral distinction between the exploitative and violent Cutler and O'Neill and the basically good if in some cases crude Jacob, Friend and Whitehead.
Although the whole story takes place in the field, and thus away from the world beyond, it also captures in microcosm in all sorts of ways the wider context of the seventeenth century and the civil war which the characters have stepped out of. Though three of the characters are veterans and / or deserters from the war, it's never entirely clear from what side, and this is probably the point - that it hardly matters, but that England is riven with all sorts of tensions and fault-lines anyway which come out in these characters' own rivalries. It's a world where society is fractured and you can't be sure who you can trust; in which magic and religion co-exist, but that religion may come in the form of simple faith, complex theology or cynicism; where bodily needs and discomforts are pressing and science is advanced enough to deliver death at the end of a musket but there is nothing much beyond herbs and superstition to stave off disease.
It's also a very visually-striking film. It's shot in black and white, entirely in the titular field. This (plus the small cast) is partly about working on a low budget, but it's a shining example of making constraint into a virtue, with lots of great wide shots of the characters walking through the long ripe grass, their dark clothes silhouetted against its pale yellow(?). Periodically, the characters also hold still in exaggerated stances, pointing at key props or features in the landscape, as though posing for the paintings and engravings which are the only visual medium through which we can directly encounter seventeenth-century England. And of course there are lots of great special effects conveying magic and / or hallucinations, culminating in a particularly trippy sequence of violent winds, flashing cross-cut images and split screens when Whitehead deliberately eats the mushrooms which populate the field and engages in a magical battle with O'Neill.
There are literally no female characters in the film at all, but I think I am OK with that, a) because it deals with a small group of refugees from a civil war battle raging off-screen at the beginning of the story, so those people are inevitably going to be men, and b) because there were clearly plenty of women in prominent positions within the production team, including the script-writer and lead producer. That said, I would definitely love to see a film which offered the surreality, visual aesthetic, and feel for the social and historical context of the seventeenth century which this one did, but was also strongly or even wholly focused on female characters.
Dreamwidth version |
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