A body I have seen

[ashlyme]

 

Some impressions of Mark Jenkins' ENYS MEN (non-linear thoughts, but then it's a non-linear film). Written for sovay .

 

It's spring 1973, according to the logbook of the Volunteer (Mary Woodvine): an elfin woman in her fifties,  monitoring a rare flower on an island off the Cornish coast. Her days seem much the same. Tea and whatever broadcast the old ivory Dansette  in the kitchen can offer. A thermometer reading of the soil near the flowers (the logbook reads "no change" over and over). Dropping a rock into a mineshaft and waiting for it to hit. Reading a paperback of Edward Goldsmith's A Blueprint for Survival by candlelight. Contact with the mainland is usually lost in a drizzle of static; a taciturn boatman drops off supplies. She makes him scones, fucks him against a wall; they have sparse conversations. She tells him "I'm not on my own."

 

Well, there is the standing stone that neighbours her cottage, looking like a hunched hooded figure with its back always turned to the camera. And there are the ghosts. The Volunteer has brought one of her own to Enys Men - a dark-haired teenage girl in cardy and flares who likes to stand on the glass roof of the outhouse. The Volunteer warns her against it - too late or too soon? We see the girl tumble through glass, a stomach cut open... and the Volunteer lift her pyjama shirt to reveal a long scar on her belly. Memory, dream, haunting - they all seem one here. The other ghosts are of the island. A door opens into a tunnel filled with silent staring miners; white-clad children hold flowers and sing in Cornish around the ruin of the cottage; a drowned lifeboat crew stand on the cliffs. They seem  content to watch the Volunteer as she goes about her days; are they malign? The boatmen grin when she presses her palm to the hob of her cooker. Another time, she's about to drop a rock in the mineshaft when she sees a miner beaming up at her from the depths. The dead aren't giving anything away, but then even in the face of all this, the Volunteer is pretty opaque too. She seems stoical rather than truly frightened. 

 

Time is awry on Enys Men - looping or jumping tracks. She finds debris from a wreck yet to be on the shore. One moment she's entering the cottage, the next glitching back into being at the standing stone. The stone itself vanishes from the landscape. The grey-green lichen that grew on its face spread to the flowers, more real than their white petals - and then they colonise the scar on the Volunteer's stomach: an image right out of Aickman's last story "The Stains". (Maybe it's worth noting that the only other book that appears with a title in ENYS MEN is the Observer's Book of Lichen; I have the same edition, in the same dustjacket.) A shot of the logbook's previous pages implies she has been on the island for a very long time - it's too fast to see the dates. The Volunteer cuts an unblemished flower, returns to an ivy-shawled, glass-less cottage, and it feels to the viewer that this is not the cottage of the past after all... but it might be a home of sorts.

 

I loved it, of course. Calling ENYS MEN "folk horror" does it a disservice - it feels closer to Rudkin or Garner in spirit than say, MIDSOMMAR. Its ambiguity, cycles, and the closed-off protagonist remind me of POSSUM There is no sacrifice, no evil. Just Time, happening all at once. The rituals we see here are mostly the Volunteer at her work. It's a story of landscape and hauntings, perhaps one of a woman settling into her own ghosthood. I'm not enough of a film geek to talk about Jenkins using 16mm film, but the colour saturation seemed rich, like an old picture postcard. I collect them, so that's not an insult. Apparently all the audio was dubbed post-production, which might explain why I felt there was something strange about the sound; I couldn't quite put my finger on it. There's little dialogue in the film, so nothing is affected. Woodvine is superb. Her acting is naturalistic, minimal; the script doesn't show the Volunteer's inner life - but then perhaps it's happening all around her: island as projection screen. Or she herself is being played; a tape in the stone deck.

I came for the ghosts, stayed for the lichen. A DVD is due in May, so I'll be going back to the island.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[asakiyume]

Came for the ghosts, stayed for the lichen--totally sold! After reading your entry (thanks to Sovay pointing out that it was here! Even though we're mutuals I might have missed it otherwise), I went and watched trailers and a review. It seems very, very cool--all time at once: neat.

I do wonder about all the sound being dubbed in afterward. I don't have an opinion about that; I just wonder at the why of it.

[ashlyme]

I don't know why Jenkins does all his sound post-production; I saw a trailer for his early film BAIT and the dialogue just felt - ugh - cheapo lip-sync.

I hope you enjoy ENYS MEN if you see it. It's slow and nebulous and a bit of an acquired taste, but well worth the time.

[asakiyume]

I think I would enjoy it! Hope it comes round.

[sovay]

I don't have an opinion about that; I just wonder at the why of it.

There are still practical reasons to shoot MOS, although I agree that an entire feature film feels like a deliberate choice: it makes me think of further disturbances of time, sound subtly disjointed from image. It could also be recalling film formats that don't come with synchronized sound, like early Super 8.

[asakiyume]

*nodding*

Both those reasons make it a good choice.