Every time I watch Ben Whitley’s fungal revue, I get to a point—normally within the first ten minutes—where I wonder how is it possible that I liked it so much the last I saw it. With the same punctuality, an indefinite stretch further into the film, I always find myself completely enthralled.
However paced by a few attractive lines and scraps of dialogue—after being threatened that he will never leave the field, the mildly uncombed Whitehead says, ‘Then I shall become it! I shall consume all the ill fortune which you are set to unleash! I shall chew up all the selfish scheming and ill intentions that men like you force upon men like me and bury it in the stomach of this place!’—A Field in England doesn’t carry any particularly profound message and doesn’t indulge in pretentious ostentations of auteurism. Rendered more grey than monochrome by manifest digital vices, its tin-plated b/w never comes across as cinephile rhetoric but feels perfectly attuned to the narrative, besides offering a clever contrast to the garish imaginary of psychedelia.
One of the most intriguing collaborations between Wheatley and Amy Jump to date, A Field in England feels instead as a candid act of cinema whose uneducated instincts happen to feed a most genuine experimental attitude.
Whereas the prologue is occasionally spoiled by some awkward comedy attempts—like a soldier awakening from apparent death saying, ‘Did someone mention ale?’—the film puts soon itself together replacing the facetious with the witty and the ironic. Even preposterous moments—like a character materialising from a post pulled out of the ground in a sort of asymmetric tug of war—seem to find their place within the surreal context.
As for the entire psychedelic sequence, it’s nothing short of an intoxicating if raw work of visual bravura, which in my mind relates to the most energising piece of advice I’ve ever heard given. Speaking about the fear of not doing the right thing—or at least not what seems right in the eyes of someone in a hierarchical position to judge—Paul Thomas Anderson once said, ‘Just don’t give a fuck, that’s kind of the best thing to do.’ That, in many ways, is exactly the spirit A Field in England seems to be fuelled by. Bizarre, flawed, brazen, inspiring.
There is a rare creative lucidity to the defecatory madness of Hard to Be a God. I would be lying if I claimed to have fully grasped its essence, though cogency is hardly a quality the author appears to be after. What comes through clearly in his Bruegelian delusion is what he once declared, that he was interested in nothing but ‘the possibility of building a world, an entire civilisation from scratch.’
Converted from native colour stock to a strikingly grim b/w, Aleksei German’s apocalyptic orgy of rot and rain demands a certain degree of cinephile stamina—but not for nothing. Its exhaustingly slow pace and murky narrative convey a palpable sense of stillness, anguish and oppression, likely intended to evoke the dereliction of Stalinist Russia while stirring broader reflections on human nature.
What more than anything seems to shape the intellectual and metaphorical core of the film, are its visceral cinematographic idiosyncrasies—the camerawork, specifically. Crisp, spherical lenses wander through the delirious carnival like one-eyed, crooked creatures, seamlessly shifting in and out of POVs and seeking physical contact with props and bodies. Characters often emerge from behind the camera, à la Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s Aguirre—unexpected, unwelcome, occasionally staring straight at us, delivering sporadic, nonsensical fragments of lines or lovely guttural grunts. There is an almost uncomfortable sort of urgency to all this—one difficult to articulate in words yet strangely addictive.
However arcane and strenuous, Hard to Be a God is the monumental work of a master. It touched me like great art does, leaving me beguiled, inspired—and eager to take a long, warm shower.
