RATING
Director(s): Mona Fastvold
Country: United States
Author: Mona Fastvold, Brady Corbet
Actor(s): Lewis Pullman, Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie
Written by Tom Augustine
In a world full of cinema genres at risk of going extinct, perhaps none is more endangered than the musical. The 2020s has become a graveyard for musicals given extravagant budgets, only to flop miserably: West Side Story, Cyrano, Joker: Folie à Deux, In the Heights, Mean Girls, Dear Evan Hansen, Cats, and so on. The big musical successes, namely Wicked and Wonka, are intriguing exceptions typified by the way they keyed into pre-existing ‘IP’ fanbases. By-and-large, the musical genre in the modern era seems to be one that inspires cinema-literate filmmakers, but which alienates a growing number of audience-members who have deemed the genre too juvenile or childish for the cynical age in which we live. Studios seem anxious about the potential backlash of daring to release a musical at all, thus giving life to the ‘undercover musical’: films that are marketed to conceal their true nature in order to lure unknowing viewers (such a strategy being deployed for films like Mean Girls and Joker Folie à Deux, unsuccessfully).
The efficacy of this approach is extremely dubious, and yet marketers still labour to mask the true intentions of their films for an imagined mass audience, instead of catering directly to those who would be receptive to it. If I were to prescribe one of the more urgent problems for the art form, this would be it — musicals, like Westerns, are one of those foundational cinematic genres that initially showcased the uncanny possibilities of a burgeoning art form, but whose popularity has since dissipated enormously. I think we can link this societal cynicism, posing (badly) as maturity, to an inability to engage with the earnestness of the movie format at its purest, which in turn is cutting off the blood supply to the possibility of film as a uniting art form for the populace at large. Watch Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives — the images of a full crowd singing along merrily to a movie musical is the grand ideal of cinema, manifested. The musical speaks to a certain impossibility that movies make into a reality — the movie as a dream realised. At its finest, it is one of cinema’s most transcendent modes.
Consider The Testament of Ann Lee as another of these flops to add to the 2020s dustheap. Practically abandoned by its distributors, in spite of its sibling film The Brutalist taking the Oscars by storm a year earlier, it is a film that takes the idea that the characters in a musical burst into song in order to express the inexpressible as a challenge and an ethos. It is a musical, yes, but one that is closer in style and intent to something like Dancer in the Dark than La La Land. Director Mona Fastvold — who co-wrote The Brutalist with partner Brady Corbet, who in turn co-wrote Ann Lee — is utilising the same approach as that enormous film, capturing a sense of historical sweep, morphing around a transformative central performance, and doing it all on a relatively small budget. It is a better film than The Brutalist, in essentially every sense, but it is also a less classical, more alienating one, untraditional in both form and content — and one that centres on and is directed by a woman, which has, I imagine, contributed to its lacklustre representation across the board — so it’s hardly a surprise that it has been all but abandoned by audiences, awards bodies and even those responsible for its rollout. There are few films in the current cinesphere, though, that are as ambitious, thrillingly new, and artistically nourishing as this one, a film that urgently calls for viewing on a big screen to unleash its hypnotic potential.
Abrasive, peculiar and antagonistic, Mona Fastvold’s musical historical epic is the dictionary definition of an acquired taste. For those willing to get on its hyperspecific wavelength, though, it is a film both about and brushing up against transcendence.
Amanda Seyfried, one of the more underappreciated stars of our era, plays real-life historical figure Ann Lee, who came to consider herself the reincarnation of Jesus as she built the foundations of the Shaker evangelical movement in the early days of the American project. Now known primarily for their pioneering styles of furniture and architecture, the Shakers were also notable for their strikingly progressive ideals, preaching pacifism, sustainability, and the equality of all races and genders under the eyes of God. Lee was also a strident believer in celibacy and the abolition of marriage, which forms the crux of the film’s dramatic thesis, as Lee and her small, not-so-merry band of converts sets out to change the world — specifically the New World, travelling from England to America just as the Revolutionary War looms — while straining against the strictures of the flesh and of the base instincts of mankind. Fastvold’s film considers all of this with a gentle but notable remove, even as it delves into the psyche of Lee herself during stints in prison, journeys over land and sea, and in the throes of grief (it is suggested that the loss of each of Lee’s four children in their infancy was a major catalyst for her later religious activism).
Despite at one point leading a congregation of more than 6000, little is known of Lee herself, as she never left behind any writings, and her legend passed by word of mouth — a tradition the film continues in the form of Thomasin Mackenzie’s loyalist Mary Partington, who narrates the film. The mystery of Ann Lee, which Fastvold repeatedly depicts, without ever explaining, is a distance that proves fascinating, rather than off-putting. This is largely due to a perfectly pitched Seyfried, whose naturally heavenly voice and ability to oscillate between desirous and pious at the drop of a dime proves to be the all-important anchor to Fastvold’s erratic, spiky directorial style. Though Fastvold keeps her distance, neither she nor Seyfried render Lee with any hint of irony, a tricky but vital element of the film’s success. Elsewhere, Fastvold’s cast is composed of reliable character actors and emerging stars alike, with nary a bum note among them. Lewis Pullman, as Lee’s younger brother and right hand, is an intriguing, tragic presence; Christopher Abbott adds another shade to his typecast role of ‘handsome but deeply fallible lover’ as Lee’s woeful husband; David Cale, as a stalwart older member of Lee’s travelling party, provides crucial comic relief and moments of genuine warmth and kindness.
Most gratifyingly, The Testament of Ann Lee is an epic whose drama is largely interior, psychological. It is a film of tremendous spiritual depth, one that raises thorny questions about faith, identity and desire and leaves them to stew in the mind as the credits roll. Lee’s faith can equally be read as a defensive response to the tragedies that befall her, and the way they intermingle with what she perceives to be insidious carnality; or the genuine spark of enlightenment that burns too quietly and quickly to really catch fire. The film’s many musical scenes, drawn from real folk songs and the musical stylings of Daniel Blumberg, who matches his thrilling The Brutalist score with another sweeping, inventive series of motifs (complete with wailing prog-rock guitars) are a striking encapsulation of the film’s push-pull relationship with sex and desire. The thrusting, grunting vocalisations of the Shakers are, when looked at in a certain way, remarkably suggestive; a desperate, keening grasp at otherworldly ecstasy. These performances are so heightened that the sect’s rigorous rejection of sex (and, often, their utter sexlessness outside of their worship) provides a genuinely startling counterpoint. The true word for The Testatment of Ann Lee is stirring — over the course of two-and-a-half hours Fastvold achieves a hypnotic fervour, a transportative and moving depiction of a strange communion with the beyond hundreds of years removed from our current reality. Like Ann Lee herself, Fastvold’s film is one of uncommon ambition, too self-actualised and rhapsodic to be labelled pretentious; the kind of film that conveys the holy bliss of madness so effectively because of how mad you’d have to be to attempt to make it in the first place.
The Testament of Ann Lee is in cinemas now.