This is the first UK feature film to be
available simultaneously in cinemas, on freeveiw TV, on video-on-demand and on
DVD and Blu-ray. Since its release I’ve watched it twice, the first time,
admittedly fairly late in the evening, I didn’t really understand what was
going on, the second time I’m still not totally sure but enjoyed it a great
deal more. In an interview that followed the Film4 screening Ben Wheatley
admitted that its not meant to be easily understood and deliberately nothing in
the movie is explained, we are just parachuted in to a different time zone and
left to get on with it!
This is the fourth feature film that Wheatley has directed and edited. The first in 2009 was Down Terrace this was followed by Kill List in 2011 and then came his most successful film to date the black comedy Sightseers (2012). Each of these films is different from the last and the A Field in England (2013) is no exception.
Its 1648 and we are in the midst of the English Civil War which , as
every school boy will tell you, involved Oliver Cromwell’s Roundheads and King
Charles the First’s Cavaliers, a war which eventually lead to the curtailing of
the Monarch’s power only allowing them to rule with the consent of Parliament.
The first character we meet is the academic astrologer and lace maker Whitehead
(Reece Shearsmith) who escapes from his master and henceforth the battle. He
meets up with two other deserters, Jacob (Peter Ferdinando) and Friend (the
comedian Richard Glover) a man with the gift of reincarnation, a fourth man
appears, Cutler (Ryan Pope) and invites the others to join him in a nearby Ale
House (old fashioned parlance for a pub) and sets out across the field of the
title which we notice has a wonderful crop of magic mushrooms which at one
stage get cooked and eaten! Part way across this piece of English countryside our
four travellers literally pull, with the aid of a rope a fifth man, the Irish
alchemist O’Neil (the star of this years EIFF Michael Smiley), who suddenly
appears, tortures Whitehead, then instructs him to locate the spot where some
undefined buried treasure is hidden and orders the others to dig it up.
Shot in monochrome in a
field in Farnham Surrey, this unique movie has been written by Amy Jump, who had
an input into the scripts for both Kill
List and Sightseers, whose dialog
contains an imaginative use of the English language as well as a great sense of
humour which runs right through its 91 minutes running time. In fact some of it
is laugh out loud funny including a great line about Essex and dirty hands, and
also the ‘I’m going for a shite scene’ which is hilarious in a crude sort of
way and there’s Whitehead great line ‘books are easier to turn than people’. Laurie Rose’s cinematography brings the story
to life with a monochrome texture that creates a distinct period feel. Also of
note are the posed shots that give the impression that they are being posed for
a future generation like the portraiture found in books of the Wild West. An clever
and effective piece of avant-garde film making from Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley, If
this humble piece has intrigued, then watch the movie: at least twice!
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