Enys Men

Director Mark Jenkin

ENYS MEN               B+                                                                                                            Great Britain  (96 mi)  2022  d: Mark Jenkin

Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare.  Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else’s dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it.  The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.                                                                  —Joan Didion from The Paris Review, 1978

A metaphysical horror flick with Nicolas Roeg sensibilities, including the intrusion of the natural world in Walkabout (1971) and the recurring red coat image from Don't Look Now (1973), yet also in the editing, with its free-associative cross-cutting in time and space, where the bleak remoteness recalls Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937), with a minimalist yet repeating narrative that resembles the carefully choreographed, almost mathematically precise shooting scheme of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), yet also delves into ghostly realms.  This is one of the better efforts of using the COVID lockdown as a metaphor, shot during the pandemic, where isolation is a recurrent theme as we follow an anonymous middle-aged woman known only as a wildlife volunteer (Mary Woodvine, the director’s partner), the sole resident living alone on an island off the Cornish coast, instead spending her time hiking around the island in her hiking boots, studying and collecting data on a rare flower growing on the cliffs, making scientific entries into a daily journal, where at least initially not much changes as we see her making a cup of tea while listening to the scratchy sounds of a shortwave radio broadcast and/or a two-way radio.  The grind of the routine is all that matters, with the director establishing a rhythm and unpretentious avant-garde aesthetic where not much happens, providing no clear answers by the end, with very little human interaction, as it’s all about capturing the minute details of daily living in such an isolated existence, an exploration of time, memory, nature, and grief, expressed with a sense of dread and foreboding, where it’s not really horror per se, but a cinematic aesthetic.  Like the Dogma tradition, The 10 Rules of "Dogme 95", The Danish Film Movement, on Christmas Day 2012 Jenkin typed out his Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 film manifesto, checkthis.com/sldg13, consisting of 13 rules promoting his own film aesthetic, “to be realised with a minimum of fuss.”  Rules, of course, that are later meant to be broken!  In something of a one-man project, the film is written, directed, shot, and edited, with a post synchronized sound design and ambient musical score written by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, shot on 16mm using highly saturated color on aged film stock, using an outdated, wind-up Bolex camera that allows only 27 seconds per shot, where the authentic look of the film includes recurring dirt scratches and light flare-ups around the grainy edges of the frame, yet there’s an intoxicating style to the repetitious visual design of the film that is not like anything you typically see, featuring a prominent and almost playful use of a zoom lens, feeling more like an immersive viewer experience.  Jenkin’s earlier film BAIT (2019), winner of the Outstanding Debut while nominated for Outstanding British Film of the Year at the British Bafta Film Awards in 2020 that ultimately became the most successful Cornish film ever made, had a silent film era look and was also shot in a picturesque Cornish fishing village, part of England’s rugged southwestern tip where the coast is lined with towering cliffs overlooking the Celtic Sea.  Though language is sparse, occasionally heard over the radio or in carefully chosen songs, the emphasis is much like Colm Bairéad’s use of Gaelic in The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) (2022), as there is an intentional choice to infuse the film with a thematic song written in an unsubtitled Cornish Celtic language, where a hidden history and culture are resurrected in spirit, actually reviving a Cornwall heritage that once thrived, but has now fallen on hard times, becoming part of the heart and soul of the film.      

Very much focused upon texture, where the medium of film itself becomes woven into the director’s experimental artistic aesthetic, Jenkin’s film premiered in Director’s Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival in 2022, where the title (pronounced ‘Ennis Main’) is Cornish for “Stone Island,” taking place on a rocky, wind-swept island, all rocks and moss and crumbling stone ruins, where her overgrown stone home appears to be the only surviving structure.  Her sense of isolation is magnified immensely by the surrounding quiet, providing a sense of timelessness, where the first spoken word comes about fifteen minutes into a film that features only a dozen or so lines of dialogue spoken throughout the whole experience.  From the journal entries we can tell this is set in 1973, where the film is built around the woman’s same schedule as she gets up in the morning, hikes around the island, looks at the flowers, takes the soil temperature, sees birds flying out over the open sea, drops a rock down an old mining shaft listening for the sound, and observes any changes of note before cranking up the generator to provide electricity in the old cottage where she is living, typically writing “no changes” in her journal, where the endless repetitive cycle resembles the onset of cabin fever in Kubrick’s THE SHINING (1980), as once things start to change, her mental outlook slowly deteriorates, with the director developing a strange fascination for filming backwards.  A younger girl (Flo Crowe) begins to appear in the house with her, a ghostly presence that also appears standing on the roof, but she also speaks to her in a motherly manner, though she may be a younger version of herself that simply appears to her, as if she’s seeing things in her imagination that spring from her own personal memories.  Viewers don’t know how long she’s been alone on this island, or how long she’s staying, as she’s running out of supplies, but apparently is expecting to be replenished by a supply boat, as she’s connected to the outside world by a CB radio, often ignoring the voices heard.  Ambiguous to the core, not really part of any pre-existing genre (though the director drew heavily from British horror films of the 70’s, occasionally resorting to schlock horror techniques), one of the first signs that her world is falling apart is an image of the boatman (Edward Rowe), who suddenly appears on this island, and may be her husband, but disappears just as quickly, like a repressed memory, seeing just a brief flash of the man’s face.  Equally stunning is the appearance of local schoolchildren dancing and singing folk songs outside her cottage, resembling a May Day ceremony, remnants of a vanished community, singing a specially commissioned Kernewek Kemmyn song Kan Me - YouTube (4:09) written and performed again over the end credits by Gwenno, a Welsh singer raised by a Welsh activist mother and a Cornish poet father, who has become something of a one-woman Celtic revival.  This song recurs several times throughout the film, providing an atmospheric refrain, where the haunting nature echoes a theme of internal pain and loss, adding yet another layer of texture, as the line between what’s real and what’s imagined becomes more blurred, taking a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing her, along with viewers, to question the nature of what is real and what is a developing nightmare.

The cawing sounds of seagulls and gannets comprise much of the film’s sound design and visual palette, as these birds were here long before the presence of humans, living in complete harmony with nature, seen dive bombing into the sea for fish, developing a miraculous instinct for survival even in the most remote places.  The camera seems as much interested in the island itself as the woman, perhaps merging into a single consciousness, continually alternating between long takes and sudden cuts that keep viewers off balance.  In an ironic twist, the woman can be seen reading Robert Allen and Edward Goldsmith’s A Blueprint for Survival each night before bed, one of the earliest warnings of climate change in 1972, a telling sign of her own fragile state of mind, offering precious insight into the tenuous state of her well-being and shifting equilibrium, as if her own survival is at stake.  There is a nautical theme of shipwrecks, with a memorial plaque on the island for seafarers lost at sea attempting to save a supply boat in 1897, as emergency warning sounds can be heard over the radio as if it was happening in the present, where she appears to get lost in a time warp, Enys Men | Exclusive Clip | Opens Friday - YouTube (1:15), diving ever deeper into the darkest corners of the unknown, Clip: Enys Men (NEON) - YouTube  (1:18).  She also hears inexplicable sounds in the middle of the night, like water dripping, or pounding sounds underneath the earth, where she moves to explore the origin only to discover the dirty faces of tin miners illuminated by candlelight in a dripping-wet cave, men who may have lost their lives there many years ago, while an elderly preacher (John Woodvine, Mary’s father, ninety-one years old at the time) delivers apocalyptic warnings of lost faith, heard singing a healing hymn, Let the Lower Lights Be Burning - YouTube (2:46), all adding to the spectral figures connected to the island’s history who make themselves known, remnants of a time long passed, mysteriously merging together the past, present, and future.  An ancient stone monolith that has been there all along (the Boswens Menhir, standing more than eight feet tall, Boswens Menhir – ancient history, mystery and modern ...), a memorial to those lost but not forgotten, suddenly changes positions on the familiar landscape, moving closer to the home, while the flowers have also disappeared, alerting viewers that something drastic is happening, perhaps losing all sense of self, 'Enys Men' Clip - Haunting Artifact a Catalyst to ... - YouTube (1:34).  Mysterious sounds are the connecting tissue of this unsettling film, taking us into unexplored realms, like the eerie electronic musical score, the rustling wind, or the waves ceaselessly pounding the craggy rocks along the shoreline, creating a symphony of sounds that mirror her alarming deterioration, where her journal entries warn us of significant changes, as reality starts to break down, suddenly contaminated by the surrounding world, where each passing day sends her deeper into her own darkness, plunging us into the world of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968).  Jenkin grew up near the Merry Maidens Stone Circle, a collection of standing stones that have remained in a jagged circle since the Bronze Age, so his personalized familiarity with the history and cultural memory of the region has led to a twisted and discomforting portrait of human isolation, exaggerating the fear and paranoia associated with loneliness, creating an ominous reminder of how easily things are forgotten, where something truly terrifying can end up taking the place of everything we thought was familiar.  

Understanding Mark Jenkin's Cornish Folk Horror YouTube (17:12)

The Passion of Anna

THE PASSION OF ANNA                             B                    

aka:  A Passion

aka:  L 182

Sweden  (101 mi)  1969 d:  Ingmar Bergman

A break from the past, a startling shift reveals a film shot in color, with Bergman one of the last holdouts to make the color conversion, opening beautifully on a flock of sheep, like a Buñuelian reference to the human condition, or a reminder of the grace of Bresson in Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), only his second film shot in color, after ALL THESE WOMEN (1964), Bergman shifts to the final film in his Fårö Island Trilogy, where the isolation of the island setting serves as a metaphor for a beleaguered consciousness.  Each of the three films autobiographically examine the artistic temperament, with Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann starring as a couple besieged by mysterious external forces beyond one’s control, from the onset of insanity to war in Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) (1968) and Shame (Skammen) (1968), while this is another artist as fugitive film, where the harmony and stability of relationships are undercut by someone who is viciously slaughtering animals on the small island, shattering any and all hopes of trust.  Equally flimsy are lives built upon lies, with people spending most of their life finding a plausible denial for their own shortcomings, refusing to grow from the experience, remaining stuck in time, paralyzed, having to relive the same traumatic experience over and over again in a recurring Sisyphean nightmare that undercuts any hopes for real happiness.  The raging war in Shame (Skammen) becomes a battle within, an exploration for the internalization of love, with characters finding themselves on an emotional island unable to give and receive love, where Bergman’s obsession for the absence of God in his Faith Trilogy has been replaced by the absence of love and affection, perhaps culminating with SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE (1973), where dysfunctional relationships disintegrate right before our eyes, with the roving eye of Sven Nyqvist’s camera intimately capturing it all in close-ups on the faces.  It should be noted that the actors themselves were underwhelmed by the film as they were making it, not sure what Bergman had in mind, confused by the amount of improvisation on the set, which was atypical for this director, believing it was less narratively coherent and more abstract, perhaps even unfathomable, showing a distinct change in emphasis, using new techniques, introducing an avant garde twist, with artificial cutaways of the actors as themselves commenting upon the roles they’re playing, adding depth and personal insight into their characters.  Not privy to the director’s vision, they appreciate the film when seen today, but at the time they had their doubts.  Part of the anxiety surrounding the film was the break-up of Bergman and Liv Ullmann, now living separately, where a certain amount of uncertainty actually defined the picture, where it must have been particularly painful for the two of them having to be reminded daily of their regrets and open wounds that are still bleeding, painfully obvious for the world to see.  For the record, few other directors portray emotional desolation like Bergman.  The title may also be misleading, as the American title, The Passion of Anna, was not the title used in Sweden, A Passion, not restrictive to the point of view of a single character, opening up the interpretations, as the film feels more about von Sydow’s psychic disintegration and mental meltdown. 

Right off the bat, a narrative voice of Bergman himself describes what we see, identifying Andreas Winkelman (Max von Sydow) as a man running from his past, a hermit choosing to live in isolation after recovering from a messy divorce, basically avoiding all human contact.  What’s perhaps most surprising about the Fårö Island Trilogy is the dubious nature of the von Sydow character in each, a stand-in for the director, yet with few noble intentions, becoming instead a despicable character who seems incapable of love, stubborn beyond belief, where his way of handling conflict is brutally offensive and misogynistic, prone to getting drunk and beating women, flying into a rage, where his overall base crudeness is striking, the exact opposite of our impressions of von Sydow as a man, a kind and gentle soul, showing exemplary manners, the perfect example of charm and sophisticated restraint, perhaps best expressed in THREE DAYS OF THE CONDOR (1975), yet again and again he’s reduced to primal urges, where his calm exterior conceals deplorable human behavior.  The same happens here, eavesdropping on phone calls, opening private letters, borrowing money with no prospect of paying it back, sleeping with another man’s wife, and when moments are bleakest, he resorts to violent outbursts that include attempted murder threats.  All of this reflects the raging confusion that was overwhelming Bergman at the time, internally wrought with anxiety and pain.  When Anna Fromm (Liv Ullmann) shows up on his doorstep needing to use a telephone, he pretends to step outside, opening and closing the door, but remains inside to overhear her undergo a personal crisis.  Overwhelmed with grief at the loss of her husband and son in a car accident she caused, yet survived, walking with a noticeable limp and cane, she is desperate to turn her life around.  When she leaves her purse behind, he goes through it, reading a painfully revealing letter from her deceased husband (also named Andreas, strangely mirroring one another) about their impending breakup, suggesting otherwise it would lead to a nervous breakdown and psychological and physical violence.  Bergman highlights the effects of the letter by projecting it onscreen, examining it line by line.  Yet when he returns the purse, he’s invited for dinner, looking completely ill at ease dressed in a formal suit, with Anna living with her best friend Eva (Bibi Andersson) and her husband Elis (Erland Josephson), with a delusional Anna recalling with some degree of self-satisfaction that the truthfulness of her marriage has left her “something to believe in,” repeatedly describing a harmonious marriage based upon absolute honesty, “living in the truth,” though Andreas knows otherwise, having read the contents of the letter which again flashes onto the screen.  This dinner conversation was largely improvised, with Bergman having a horrific reaction to Ullmann’s comments, cutting her off midstream, refusing to allow her to continue, as if that is the bone of contention in their own deteriorating relationship. 

Re-establishing the chamber drama format, this is largely a character-based film, where Elis is a wealthy architect, paid handsomely for his latest creations, yet he’s utterly cynical, to the point of being weirdly creepy, finding his work completely meaningless, the embodiment of a disaffected existentialist without a heart or soul, getting little to no satisfaction from his creative work, taking much greater pleasure in his amateur hobby as a photographer, curiously taking portrait shots of people in emotional distress (sucking the life blood right out of them), with a studio that resembles a forensics lab, with boxes of files stored in the most meticulous fashion.  His wife Eva is a thoroughly modern woman, but initially seems overly bourgeois and superficial, as if that is her comfort zone, but she has a serious case of insomnia, suggesting deeper psychological issues.  Arriving on his doorstep one day while her husband is away, the mood quickly shifts, sensuously shot in red color filters, sipping wine, with Eva choosing a soft jazz record to play called “Always Romantic,” becoming an intoxicating prelude to love, offering kisses, but she only wants to sleep.  When she awakes, however, they make love, though mostly off camera, revealing a pregnancy that went wrong, leaving her feeling useless and alone, always living in the shadows of her husband, only understanding herself in response to others, yet stirring something inside them both, though the mood shifts again with Andreas now living with Anna.  Omitting narrative backstory has a way of intensifying what we do see, as viewers must realign the missing pieces, often having to navigate dream sequences that appear like minefields left along the road.  The atrocities of the late 60’s were reflected in Vietnam, again seen on grainy television images, but just how deeply troubled people were, driven by a need for change, was also a sign of the times, where Bergman’s Fårö Island Trilogy attempts to explore that lurking contentiousness.  While on the surface, this newly developing relationship offers the appearance of happiness, with Anna working at her typewriter as a translator while in another room Andreas sits at a desk working in some capacity for Elis, both speaking largely in coded shorthand, like many married couples do, yet under the surface they remain victims of their haunting pasts, like a weight they both carry that eats away at them, stripping them of any self-esteem or identity, instead hiding from what they fear the most, having to address their own failings, Devastating Scene from Ingmar Bergman's "The Passion of Anna ...  YouTube (4:19).  With the living Andreas eerily taking the place of the dead Andreas, it’s impossible to forget the stark image of von Sydow attacking Ullman with an ax in the wintry cold, the epitome of communication breakdown, with each hating what has become of them.  Punctuated throughout are lone characters randomly appearing living in isolation, disconnected from any social fabric, seemingly untouched by prevailing influence, yet becoming objects of suspicion.  This underlying backdrop of anger and resentment runs throughout the film, like an unseen Greek chorus displaying a hostile lynch mob mentality, a communal reaction to the animal atrocities taking place, but also a barn burning, where unsolved crimes foreshadow a deep-seeded nerve of everwidening anguish and dread.  When one poor soul is erroneously identified as the suspect at large, based completely upon rumors that he’s a former mental patient, the knives come out, where he’s suddenly a target for all the evil in the world, showing how easily the ire of our wrath is misguided.  At the center of the film is disconnection, eroding faith, fear of the unknown, and the elusiveness of love, where we all respond differently to the longing for connection, while lashing out at others feels like a reflex reaction covering up our own considerable inadequacies.  Hard to shrink away from the brutal honesty, though it seriously examines the tumultuousness of relationships, where the finale shows a picture of man as a wounded animal, completely exasperated and utterly helpless in accepting his dismal fate.