In one scene, a woman takes revenge by urinating on a man’s face until he dies, effectively drowning him through a golden shower. In another, kids line up to bash their heads on a rock, a ritual designed to teach them “where they belong”. Harvest, the new film by Athina Rachel Tsangari, is a British period drama, just not the kind that you watch with your parents. “She used the only thing available to her, which was her body,” the director says about the urine-related murder. “It was her way of waterboarding.”
Tsangari, a 59-year-old, Athens-born Greek auteur, has always made strange, uncompromising films. Launching the “Greek Weird Wave” with her once regular collaborator Yorgos Lanthimos, Tsangari shocked audiences with the sexual provocations of Attenberg, the animalistic women of The Capsule, and the literal dick-measuring contest of Chevalier. On the muddy surface, Harvest is the kind of film where actors more attuned to smartphones pretend that they can ride a horse. Except it’s soon apparent that it’s a daring thriller about xenophobia, capitalism and isolationism. It’s also, I suggest to the director, a sci-fi without any sci-fi: like her previous films, it exists in an alternate reality.
“Yes, absolutely,” says Tsangari, sitting across me in a London meeting room, adjusting her brimmed hat. “I was never going to make a costume drama.” In interviews, the director has referred to Harvest as a “nihilist western”, but prompted by my question, she reveals that she asked key members of the crew to treat the production like a “science-fiction of the past”. She continues, “Jim Crace is a science-fiction writer. He might disagree. But I decided to make this film because it’s a fantasy that’s completely interwoven with the raw elements of an enclosed society, in the middle of this abandoned, wild, untamed nature.”
Tsangari and Joslyn Barnes, who co-wrote Nickel Boys, adapted Harvest from Crace’s 2013 novel of the same name. The book, which I tried to read until it gave me a headache, is from the point of view of Walter Thirsk, a casual observer in the Middle Ages whose jumbled narration reflects his confusion as to why his remote village is being privatised. Likewise, on screen, the bewildering film never reveals the year, nor the country where it’s all unfolding. While it’s presumably before the Industrial Revolution and Tsangari barely disguises that Harvest was shot in Scotland with very Scottish weather, there are also contradictions in the timeline.
The music – much of it by The Harvest Family Band, a group comprising Tsangari, lead actor Caleb Landry Jones, and others – incorporates analogue and electronic instruments, the latter redolent of John Carpenter’s soundtracks. Moreover, the grainy cinematography is straight out of a 70s film, until a shot where the camera keeps hovering higher and higher. Tsangari was told she’s the first director to ever attach a 16mm camera to a drone. When I call it an “Athina shot”, she tells me, “It’s not an ‘Athina shot’. It’s a ‘Harvest shot’. It was a communal film.”
As Thirsk, Jones is first seen rolling around in dirt and grass, his love for nature verging on sexual. However, Thirsk is a passive protagonist who barely intervenes in the unnamed village’s events. When a stable is burned down, three strangers are scapegoated: two men are pilloried, while the third, a Black woman, Mistress Beldam (Thalissa Teixeira), has her head shaved. Thirsk, who’s secretly appalled, is more active when greeting Earle (Arinzé Kene), a visiting cartographer who’s drawing up a map, and when seducing Kitty (Rosy McEwan), the reactionary local responsible for shaving Beldam. Also present is Jordan (Frank Dillane), a businessman who wishes to take over the land and maximise profits.
We were crazy enough to do all sorts of things you’re not supposed to do. It’s why we’re making cinema
Yet amidst all the plot machinations, what really sticks is specific sequences, some of them so outrageous that the film reveals itself as a comedy, and the general sense that Tsangari is shooting a documentary about an immensely torturous production. After all, the constant rain isn’t CGI. “We would start in the morning and just keep going,” she explains. “We never stopped for weather, mud, or light. The way I shoot, we don’t stop, and the actors never know if they’re on or off camera.” Do the actors appreciate that? “I don’t know if they like it, but that was the deal from the beginning. They were there.”
She notes that Jones is a method actor. “He gets into a trance. There were times I thought it was too much. We fought over it. But he would say, ‘OK, let’s see.’ And he would be brilliant.” He would distract from the other actors? “Yeah. It’s like conducting instruments. I don’t say much. I just use my hands.” She mimes a motion of asking someone to do less. “I never speak about emotions or backstories.”
Tsangari’s debut feature, The Slow Business of Going, played festivals in 2000, but her real breakthrough as a director was Attenberg in 2010. As a producer, Tsangari worked on Lanthimos’s first three features, including Dogtooth, and Richard Linklater’s Before Midnight, in which she acts and claims the idea of a soulmate “fucks us up”. Attenberg marks the only time Lanthimos has acted: he plays The Engineer, a romantic interest for Ariane Labed’s Marina. (Lanthimos and Labed are still married to this day.)
“Yorgos was my producer and co-pilot on Attenberg,” says Tsangari. “We lost the actor who was going to play The Engineer two weeks before. He understood the tone of the film. I also saw The Engineer in him. I didn’t have to tell him anything. He acts the way he directs. He’s very comfortable and reserved. He’s a great actor.” Could she cast him in her next project? “I think he’s busy making three films a year. But who knows! He might want to do a cameo.”
Tsangari has three scripts ready to go. One of them is White Knuckles, a sci-fi comedy set in the future, and another is a collaboration with an American actress so famous that her name can’t be revealed. I tell Tsangari that I will deduce the identity if I see her in the Daily Mail being photographed having coffee with someone like Natalie Portman or Kirsten Dunst. “I have been photographed with the actress,” she says. “But I cannot say who she is.”
Whatever Tsangari does next, it’s bound to be peculiar, unsettling, and not set in Greece. In the credits of Harvest, she dedicates the film to her grandparents, whose farmland was replaced by a highway. “I’ve felt dislocation my whole life, having been uprooted from my own land, and also from my country as a filmmaker,” says Tsangari. “It’s impossible to make films in Greece. It has such an ungenerous budget for making cinema in its own language. It’s also the only Western world country that has no film academy.” She saw a personal connection with Harvest? “Yes. There’s something about being exiled from your own land, and fearing that you’re being co-opted within a system that uses you as an artist as a tool for power.”
Still, Tsangari wishes to emphasise that Harvest, made outside of Greece, was a strenuous production. “When we were shooting the dance, which was choreographed in detail with everyone, it was almost like a tornado, and we didn’t stop shooting,” she says. “Another crazy thing is the burning of the barn. We didn’t have enough time or money. We had two takes to do it. But we got it together because we were working as one body, one voice, one soul.” She adds, “We were crazy enough to do all sorts of things you’re not supposed to do. It’s why we’re making cinema.”
Harvest is out in UK and Irish cinemas on July 18
