TIFF '24: Produced by Ken Loach

by Cláudio Alves

Before Toronto, HARVEST premiered in Venice's official competition.

In 2023, Ken Loach premiered what the world assumes is his last film, The Old Oak, which earned a mixed reaction at Cannes and seems to have been quickly forgotten. Regardless of his swan song's reception, Loach's legacy is indisputable, and one year later, we can see that it extends beyond the films that bear his directing credit. Sixteen Films, a production company he co-founded with Rebecca O'Brien in 2002 that, until now, had been dedicated to Loach's directorial efforts, is now supporting the work of other filmmakers, a fair share of up-and-comers. As Loach recedes even further behind the scenes, Sixteen Films is reborn into a new life. Harvest and On Falling, two of their first productions, bowed at TIFF, though only the latter was a world premiere…

HARVEST, Athina Rachel Tsangari

A member of the notorious Greek Weird Wave, Athina Rachel Tsangari has been away from the big screen for quite some time. Her last feature was 2015's Chevalier, nearly a decade ago. In that regard, Harvest is something a grand return, though it's also a step into the unknown. After a few ventures into TV, this is the director's first English-language feature and her first outright period piece, taking place in what one supposes is 18th-century Scotland, not long after George III's Inclosure Act gave more power to landowners and set in motion an economic upheaval that would factor in the Industrial Revolution. However, one can only assume since Tsangari's notions of time and place are unspecific to a frustrating degree.

Though Jim Crane's novel, on which the narration-heavy film is based, explicitly sets its action in England, Tsangari moved the production to Scotland and had her actors put on a litany of most unconvincing accents. A small change on the surface, this messes with the story's overt reflections on our contemporary lives and the infection of xenophobia within modern-day Great Britain. It muddles the history and the politics, revealing basic misunderstandings of the literary original. By the end of the week-long tale of a community's implosion, one feels the film has been tripping over its two feet for two hours, only sometimes landing on any kind of thematic clarity. Then again, maybe Tsangari was going for a general pastoral mood, an allegory displaced from such details, something out of time that could happen anywhere, at any point in our shared past.

The design decisions certainly indicate a lackadaisical approach, with Nathan Parker's sets and Kirsty Halliday's costumes forever undecided about exactly what period they're reviving. At times, the wardrobe seems like the crew robbed a few community theater productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and called it a day. Rather than engaging with the material as it is contextualized in history, the team behind Harvest appears more beholden to the aesthetics of 1970s American cinema, coming dangerously close to outright pastiche on a couple of occasions. While aesthetically pleasant, it's a needless affectation. The drugged-out frolic that opens the flick is its most glaring example but far from the only one.

In many such scenes, Tsangari and her cast seem motivated by acting exercise antics and a willfulness toward outright anachronism. If only one could perceive the purpose behind the stylistic choice. If only it all made any sense, all brought together under the umbrella of one single project whose parts are always more interesting than the whole. There's the bad, like what was just mentioned, and how that symptomatic allergy to specificity affects performers, unmoored and incapable of making their characters' actions and inactions come across as credible. Take the bond between Caleb Landry Jones and Harry Melling. Considering the filmmaking signs all around, it should be one of the backbones of the tale, especially with the emotional pay-off the ending tries to pull off.

Yet, the viewer is never allowed to go deep into the liaison between landlord and erstwhile second-hand turned peasant. And so, when it's time to feel something about their fates, apathy reigns supreme. In the midst of such misery, one must be thankful for whatever mercy comes their way, and Harvest has a couple of masterful gestures to act as the flick's lifeboat in the waves of mediocrity. The original score, authored by four composers including Jones, is a delight of successive disruptions – the anachronism works here, if nowhere else. Then, one must consider Sean Price Williams' celluloid cinematography, every frame a lush and lustful poem, brimming with life. Harvest is the most beautiful of all his jobs as DP, spanning from nocturnal walks across bright indigo skies to the flickering violence of fire, the false promise of the land and its people.

ON FALLING, Laura Carreira

There's a specific texture to today's loneliness. Many films have captured its taste and odor, the anguish as it consumes the forsaken soul. Yet, the texture is often missed, lost and low on a list of creative priorities. It's the touch of a cracked phone screen, smooth glass interrupted by rough lines, and the callouses you get on the fingers that hold the device. It's the greasy surface on that same screen after you scroll for too long. It's the crisp plastic around packaged foods, the cling-wrap around old sandwiches to eat on a table with no one else around. Or worse, a table full of people who are unreachable to the desperate. It's clammy skin, pressed by one's own tired hands in hopes of relieving the tensions of repetitive, strenuous labor. 

In her debut feature, Laura Carreira gets the taste, the stink, she gets the immaterial feel and the texture, too. On Falling is a formidable treatise on the experience of those who feel deserted by the world, trapped in vicious cycles and unable to escape the vice grip of involuntary solitude. Moreover, hers is a film that exemplifies a truth few pictures acknowledge in their self-conception - to make art that feels universal in its conclusions, one must refrain from reaching toward the universal. As we see here, the path to such readings goes through the particular, the more granular the better. The alternative is naught but vacuous pandering.

On Falling builds up the specificities of its subject, drawing from Carreira's own perspective as a Portuguese-born woman trying to make it in the UK. Not that this is a self-portrait. Far from depicting an artist's journey, her feature portrays the life of a picker, one of those folks who work in giant warehouses and set up the orders others make through online platforms. She's Aurora, and we meet her only after we've become intimately acquainted with the motion of her daily duties. Before Carreira lets the viewer peer into the character's inner life, long takes follow the motions of scanning barcodes and rummaging for the proper product.

It's hypnotic, like a ballet of the mechanized body, depersonalized so it can better operate for the company's profit. If there's any delay in her work, a beeping noise will go off, and automatized reports of diminished productivity are sure to send managers down to the floor for a stern talking too. Sometimes they put on the façade of concern, but only the numbers matter. The same people will deny an anguished plea for a day off for a doctor's appointment. In this system, the worker always comes second after the fruits of their labor. And they all know it, clear-eyed about their prescribed unimportance as cogs in the machine.

Aurora need not verbalize it to prove her lucidity over the matter. Joana Santos' projections of weary resignation do all the talking. The actress is brilliant in the tricky introspective register On Falling demands of her, often caught in scenes where Aurora's inability to communicate and reach out is the most salient point. Yet she yearns for conversation, for a chit-chat, no matter how inconsequential. Anything works, if only to muffle the quiet. Apart from a fellow Portuguese migrant played by the always reliable Inês Vaz, Aurora's days seem defined by work and nothing else. To most, that's all she is. Even to herself.

Carreira depicts this in various forms, often using keen, yet inconspicuous devices like the imposition of off-screen conversations in the sound mix, hammering home how much Aurora is failing at any sort of human connection. A whisper of kindness at lunch one day is only prelude to a tragedy so commonplace it's immediately forgotten by all but Aurora, who grieves for the fallen but also for herself. Then there's a new Polish neighbor in the migrant boarding house she calls home, though it never feels like one. Cordiality inches its way to friendship, but an unexpected expense and unpaid light bill make Aurora into a pariah, so scared of seeing scorn in the eyes of her peers that she'll stay in the shadow and in silence, performing non-existence during a power cut.

Loneliness erodes but hunger hurts, and Aurora is starving. After the incident, she spends much of the film barely scraping by on over-sugared coffee from the warehouse and whatever sustenance she can find. Such is the depth of her disposession, it's astonishing how much grace Carreira manages to weave into the woman's story, somehow pulling Aurora away from being only understandable as a vessel for the world's misfortune. In other words, it's too much to bear but never feels like exploitation. Instead, it's sober social realism with an empathetic eye. Moments when Aurora receives kindness from strangers are especially powerful, lacerating by denying us the expected spectacle of cruelty.