Directed by Ben Rivers Club, QFT, Belfast, 88 min
GREAT GRIZZLY Wilderness, you got to see this movie. Don’t believe us? Then just ask, well, anyone else. Jonathan Romney, the critic over at the Independent, awarded this ascetic chronicle of a recluse five stars and a 950-word rave.
Other respectable chin-strokers (Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, judges for Copenhagen’s Dox Grand Prix) were equally impressed.
Awards are nothing new for Ben Rivers, an artist who creates work based on real, hermitical subjects who, in turn, have removed themselves from the workaday world. The director’s vérité shorts, detailing life below the radar and off the grid, have won a hatful of gongs. Two Years at Sea, his first feature-length work, intensifies the eerie beauty of these earlier pieces.
The title is merely a clue. Jake Williams spent two years at sea in order to finance a life of absolute solitude in the Outer Hebrides. His wordless adventures – floating on an improvised raft, listening to odd ditties on an ancient gramophone, chopping wood – are punctuated by a series of old photographs without caption or explanation. He lives between a ramshackle house and an old caravan on the same grounds and his existence, though not devoid of humour, is silent and monastic.
The pace of this tremendous portrait makes last year’s Le Quattro Volte seem like Marvel Avengers Assemble; the quiet spiritualism makes Into Great Silence look like Transformers. But there’s no artifice in the editing or the structure. Williams, the subject of the film-maker’s earlier This Is My Land, is an outsider in every sense: socially and chronologically. Any attempts to impose an order on the quiet isolation would be disingenuous.
Still, Rivers creates a strange, distant communion with his star, and traverses after Williams as a floating, unseen ghost. Using old 16mm Bolex cameras and developing much of the stock by hand in his kitchen sink, Rivers never fails to impress as an artisan or craftsman in an era when such terms are typically applied to factory produced muffins and ketchup.
