Since Thou Wast Mild and Lovely premiered at the Berlinale a few months ago, Brooklyn-based filmmaker Josephine Decker has been flooded with accolades for the way her impressionistic farm drama turns conventional narrative wisdom upside down, much like the work of lyricism-prone contemporaries Shane Carruth, Leos Carax and Terrence Malick. Carruth's gorgeously lensed hallucinatory marvel Upstream Color provides an especially apt point of comparison to Decker's deeply unsettling, East of Eden-inspired psychosexual thriller.
Set on a remote Kentucky farm, Thou Wast is a magic realism-imbued character study of Sarah (Sophie Traub), a young woman wrestling with erotically charged desires and emotional impulses for the two men in her life: Jeremiah (Robert Longstreet), her overbearing, dagger-eyed father figure, and Akin (mumblecore maven and DIY don Joe Swanberg), the withdrawn, plaid shirt-attired, secretly married hired hand spending the summer on their property. The simmering sexual spark and lingering glances between Sarah and Akin are only heightened her intuition that the cantankerous Jeremiah would definitely not approve of the hook-up. Sarah raises a red flag early on when she tells her paramour: "I would have a baby right now… if daddy would let me."
While this all sounds like a fairly straightforward (if perverse) love triangle, the execution is really anything but. With Sarah's recurring poetic narration about an esoteric "lover" (is she referring to a man, the countryside or… the universe?), and the tale's continuously shifting realms of consciousness and perspectives (from Sarah's POV to Akin's to… a cow's!), Thou Wast shrouds its characters' darkest truths in layers of cinematic frosting, leaving mystified viewers to fill in the storytelling gaps.
Decker and cinematographer Ashley Connor immerse us in an intimate limbo land of pastoral delights: eloquent fantasy sequences rendered in glowing colours, hypnotic time-lapse photography of the story's bucolic whereabouts, sensuous handheld shots gliding across the land, animals, bodies and flowers, plays with focus to heighten fantasies and skewed framing to underscore characters' troubled psyches. By turns nightmarish, titillating and dreamlike, Thou Wast is one hell of an experiential enigma.
(Independent)Set on a remote Kentucky farm, Thou Wast is a magic realism-imbued character study of Sarah (Sophie Traub), a young woman wrestling with erotically charged desires and emotional impulses for the two men in her life: Jeremiah (Robert Longstreet), her overbearing, dagger-eyed father figure, and Akin (mumblecore maven and DIY don Joe Swanberg), the withdrawn, plaid shirt-attired, secretly married hired hand spending the summer on their property. The simmering sexual spark and lingering glances between Sarah and Akin are only heightened her intuition that the cantankerous Jeremiah would definitely not approve of the hook-up. Sarah raises a red flag early on when she tells her paramour: "I would have a baby right now… if daddy would let me."
While this all sounds like a fairly straightforward (if perverse) love triangle, the execution is really anything but. With Sarah's recurring poetic narration about an esoteric "lover" (is she referring to a man, the countryside or… the universe?), and the tale's continuously shifting realms of consciousness and perspectives (from Sarah's POV to Akin's to… a cow's!), Thou Wast shrouds its characters' darkest truths in layers of cinematic frosting, leaving mystified viewers to fill in the storytelling gaps.
Decker and cinematographer Ashley Connor immerse us in an intimate limbo land of pastoral delights: eloquent fantasy sequences rendered in glowing colours, hypnotic time-lapse photography of the story's bucolic whereabouts, sensuous handheld shots gliding across the land, animals, bodies and flowers, plays with focus to heighten fantasies and skewed framing to underscore characters' troubled psyches. By turns nightmarish, titillating and dreamlike, Thou Wast is one hell of an experiential enigma.
