Get the latest gossip
‘Harvest’ Review: Athina Rachel Tsangari’s Brawny, Brutal, Beautiful Fable of a Torn-Up Farming Community
In 'Harvest,' her first English-language feature, Athina Rachel Sangari plunges audiences into the mud, sweat and tears of pre-industrial agriculture.
Taking on British author Jim Crace’s Booker-shortlisted historical novel about a farming community undone by parochial distrust and encroaching capitalism, Tsangari’s vigorous, yeasty period piece occasionally loses the thread of its sprawling ensemble narrative, but transfixes as a whole-sackcloth immersion into another time and place. As in Crace’s novel, neither is specified, though the accents and craggy-lush landscape — the film was shot on location in Argyllshire, Scotland — point emphatically northwards, while the year could be any in the 17th or even early 18th centuries: before the Industrial Revolution, but after the advent of inclosure acts that saw previously common land privatized, ending the open-field system of the Middle Ages. Though this isn’t an all-male collective — “Blue Jean” star Rosy McEwen makes an impression as one of the most reactionary villagers, with Teixeira tersely defiant as the first target of her ire — “Harvest” locates the imperiously masculine dynamics of ownership and competition on which this transitional era of history (and many before and since) pivoted, with personal wealth prioritized over the greater good of the people, to say nothing of the environment.
Or read this on Variety