If familiarity breeds contempt, unfamiliarity all too often breeds indifference, and it takes a film festival overseas to lend well-deserved prominence to an American filmmaker who is hardly known in her home country. I wrote last year about “Butter on the Latch,” the first dramatic feature directed by Josephine Decker, which is still awaiting distribution. Fortunately, there’s the Berlin Film Festival, which brings that film together with Decker’s new feature, “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely.” I saw it in a New York screening and am impatient to see it again.
“Thou Wast Mild and Lovely” has the framework of a rustic, lyrical American ballad: a young man takes work as a resident laborer on a remote farm and falls in love with the farmer’s daughter, who begins a romance with him. But the young man happens to be married and is hiding the fact. His employer nonetheless susses out the secret, with melodramatic results. Like most classic stories, this one is simple, but its realization is so surprising in its details, so original in its visual invention, as to make most other movies seem (at least temporarily) shot by the numbers.
Decker’s first feature, “Butter on the Latch,” was born of a conspicuously documentary impulse: Decker placed her actors in an actual and functioning “Balkan camp,” a residential workshop for music and dance in the deep countryside. The new film, with its voice-over and carefully unfolding action, bears the trace of writing, but, for Decker, the presence of something like a script plays a role similar to the performing arts in the earlier film. Literature itself is the movie’s inspiration (in fact, Decker cites Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” as a starting point), and there’s just enough reading that takes place in the film itself to suggest the private conjuring of voices in a place of vast loneliness, a realm of fantasy in a place of drudgery. It’s as if the movie were undergirded by a sense of timeless authority borrowed from scripture.
The laborer, Akin, is played by Joe Swanberg, the director who, having begun his career by acting in his own movies, has started working in those of others as well. With a minimum of method and a maximum of concentration, he invests Akin with fury and guilt, and also the desire and an inhibition that fuels it further. As Sarah, the young woman whose isolation at the farm renders her all the more vulnerable to the charms of the quiet stranger, Sophie Traub reveals a blend of earthy strength and furtive gentility. The natural poetry of her immediate responses to the muddy land and the bright sky, to animals and flowers, wood and dirt, flourish in the presence of Akin while they are also stifled by the hardass wisdom of her father—played by Robert Longstreet, whose grainy baritone growl seems unearthed from all the Westerns of vanished dreams.
Working with her actors, Decker doesn’t seem to observe behavior but to invent it: the characters bring a glint of whimsy, a lilt of pain, and an undertone of seething erotic power to the seemingly most ordinary activities. The images by the cinematographer, Ashley Connor (who also shot “Butter on the Latch”), exalt bodies and movement, light and texture into frenzies of vertiginous possibility. The subject of the images is time, in exactly the same way that a writer can describe a single moment of feeling, an instant of vision, or a flicker of memory through the course of sentences and paragraphs. Normally it would be an insult to say that a movie that runs a mere hour and a quarter feels as if it were much longer, but here it’s both accurate and high praise: vast realms of emotional experience are condensed into the movie’s brief span.
Early last year, when Steven Soderbergh announced his retirement from movie-making, he cited an aesthetic reason behind his decision:
I agree, and I think that something of the sort is beginning to make its appearance. Last year brought “Upstream Color,” “To the Wonder,” and “Butter on the Latch.” “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely” is the latest, and, to my mind, the most extreme, of these new films. It’s not a conclusion, and it’s not the only recent movie that suggests that there’s something new in the air. Such films as Miranda July’s “The Future,” Terence Nance’s “An Oversimplification of Her Beauty,” Raúl Ruiz’s “Night Across the Street,” Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors,” Jafar Panahi’s “This Is Not a Film,” and (by pure coincidence, our most recent DVD of the Week) Agnès Varda’s “The Beaches of Agnès” point far ahead to a “new grammar” of narrative, or, rather, a reappraisal of narrative of the kind that Soderbergh proposes.
In the meantime, the simplicity and spontaneity of “Thou Wast Mild and Lovely” offers the primal renewal of the image, an image that emerges in the immediate form of the filmmaker’s emotional impulses. The viewer’s sense of discovery seems to converge with Decker’s own. Her movie feels like a wildly urgent direct address in real time.
