Clio Barnard (2017)
At the start of Dark River, the heroine Alice (Ruth Wilson), a contract agricultural worker, explains to her current boss that her father has died and that she’ll now be returning to live and work on the family farm in Yorkshire. The boss (Jonah Russell) lightly touches Alice’s hand to express his sympathy for her loss. She flinches from the contact. That night, lying in bed, she sees an older man enter her room. He does it again as soon as she goes to bed back in Yorkshire. Soon afterwards, there’s a flashback to the younger Alice (Esme Creed-Miles) in bed; the door opens and the same man appears. The writer-director Clio Barnard has soon made it clear that this man (Sean Bean) is Alice’s late father and that he sexually abused his daughter during her adolescence. Alice expects another, better inheritance in the form of the farm’s tenancy, which her father promised her. On her return, however, she finds herself competing for the tenancy with her brother Joe (Mark Stanley), who’s been managing the place during the father’s long terminal illness. Joe opposes Alice’s various attempts to innovate and revive the farm’s fortunes. A representative of a water company (William Travis) informs Joe that, if his tenancy application succeeds, he’ll be able to evict Alice and sell the property to a developer. What happens next is too grimly and melodramatically predictable to be worth recording.
Although Barnard’s film is ‘inspired’ by a Rose Tremain novel called Trespass (set in rural France), cinemagoers will see in Dark River a clear kinship with Hope Dickson-Leach’s The Levelling (2016). There are several similarities. The three key characters, members of a farming family, are a sister and brother and their father. The narrative starting point is the death of one of this trio. There’s then an unhappy family backstory to exhume. Livestock is at continuing risk of death or injury that symbolises the plight of the human characters. The financial outlook for the farm is bleak. So are the prevailing tone of the film and the weather in it. At least in The Levelling the waterlogged ground and louring skies were essential to the scheme of the story – they referred to real-life rainfall in a specific time and place. In Dark River, the weather conditions are merely and obviously metaphoric. Barnard rigorously eschews contrast between the principals’ misery and a bright external landscape, though this might have been more interestingly atmospheric. The one conspicuously sunlit sequence is the very last in the film: it’s anyone’s guess what this is supposed to mean but I took it to be a fantasy, an illustration of what might have been (how, though?) for Alice and Joe.
Both leads give committed performances. Mark Stanley’s is the more nuanced. Stanley has impressed in recent television serials, one heavyweight and unconvincing (Jimmy McGovern’s Broken), the other entertainingly ridiculous (Kay Mellor’s Love, Lies and Records). He was a surprising choice for Professor Bhaer in the TV adaptation of Little Women last Christmas but did well in the role. It’s crucial to Dark River that Alice and her brother don’t say a lot to each other, that Joe expresses himself chiefly through anger and physical action. Stanley nevertheless makes the most of what he gets to say – especially in a scene in which Joe lists the various types of wildlife in his hay meadow, that he’s keen to protect. The brother’s imprisonment in hopeless, hard-drinking routine and fear of the future are more convincing than the sister’s return to a past she escaped from as soon as she could – essential though that return is to the plot. Ruth Wilson’s strong, distinctive face is the dominant image of Dark River but Alice is a sketchily written character. It’s not clear quite what effect her father’s abuse has had on her adult relationships with other men. The early scene mentioned above implies she can’t bear even to be touched. The brief resurgence of a relationship with Tower (Shane Attwoll), a boyfriend from Alice’s teenage years, suggests otherwise. (Tower now works as a euthaniser, putting animals out of their misery …)
In Sight & Sound (February 2018). Nick Pinkerton’s review of a collection of Dave Kehr’s film criticism begins with:
‘There are two kinds of writing about film. One treats movies as star vehicles, or bellwethers of social and political phenomena, or triggers to personal recollection. The other assesses them as a series of decisions made from post-to-pre-production intended to tell a particular story, crystallise a particular feeling, or express a particular ethos, and makes the effort of reverse-engineering to get back to the root of authorial intention, and to then measure that intention against accomplishment.’
(Pinkerton goes on to praise Kehr as a leading exponent of the latter school.) Trevor Johnston’s interview with Clio Barnard in the next Sight & Sound seems to spare the reverse-engineer a large part of the effort that Pinkerton applauds. Johnston’s piece details the ‘stealth documentary input’ to Dark River. Barnard summarises what she set out to achieve:
‘The PJ Harvey song we have in there [‘My Father Left Me an Acre of Land’], is about getting the audience to think about the history of the land, and the way its commodification has accelerated in recent years. But also I wanted to show how damaging it is living with rage when it’s internalised and suppressed, and to make connections between the way the father objectifies his daughter’s body, and the way we objectify the land, objectify nature. … [T]he upshot for me is that we need to rethink our relationship with the land. I never want to preach, but this is a story which needs telling.’
Dark River, according to the Pinkerton measurement test, isn’t a failure: Barnard does provoke the thoughts and get across the ideas she was after. But she does so in ways so limited and unimaginative, in both dramatic and visual terms, that it’s hard for this viewer to see the end result as successful. You get the sense from Barnard’s comments in S&S that because ‘this is a story which needs telling’ she thinks that how she tells it is of strictly secondary importance. As in God’s Own Country, the writer-director had the two main actors learn farm work techniques first hand – Ruth Wilson does all her own sheep-shearing etc. This doesn’t make Dark River as all-round authentic as Clio Barnard seems to suppose.
27 February 2018
