The future is a concept and reality that never quite made it to Cornwall, located on England’s southwestern peninsula. There’s a buoyant tourist trade attracting some quarters who are seeking the country’s old maritime culture and spirit, but that’s the exception, rather than the terminal rule, with vast social inequality dominating and any government “levelling up” policies targeting urban regeneration in the country’s North. British independent filmmaker Mark Jenkin made these environs his speciality in his past features Bait [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Mark Jenkin
scheda film] and Enys Men [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], but he leans furthest into this depressing prognosis for Cornwall’s future in his third film, Rose of Nevada. Embracing fantasy, so it can reanimate a more optimistic time in the region’s past, the film profoundly captures the current political anger and nostalgia about the UK’s declining regional pride. Jenkin’s first film at Venice has premiered in the Orizzonti section.

Although the star presences of George MacKay and especially the tabloid-popular Callum Turner should draw curious eyes towards Rose of Nevada, it still finds Jenkin maintaining a plateau, rather than achieving a new peak in quality from his past work, with the mesmerising Bait still arguably his most accomplished film, on account of its novelty, humour and outright “UFO” quality. Yet there’s pleasing rigour and realism that Jenkin conjures (and he’s a veritable one-man band – shooting, scoring and editing the film also), which really beguile, making the chief plot point, of a ship (carrying the film’s title) thought to have sunk mysteriously reappearing on the dock, feel seamlessly part of the movie’s tonal universe.

Mackay is Nick, a local family man, first seen traipsing to a food bank to pick up supplies for his wife and child, whilst spending his (out-of-work?) days mending their leaky roof. Turner is Liam, a drifter on the run under unexplained circumstances, although he has the shiftiness and ruthless self-preservation of someone who may have committed a crime. With the boat and a Herman Melville character-like captain (Francis Magee) in tow, they take on the role of work-hungry, able-bodied seamen of a previous generation, and set sail, with fresh fish to be caught – once the town’s economic lifeblood.

Shooting on location, with a 16 mm Bolex camera snug in the ship’s cramped quarters, Jenkin creates an experiential, documentary feeling to the sea sequences – immersive visual ethnography akin to the pioneering 2012 documentary Leviathan [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], on US industrial fishing trawlers. The foamy, white water splashes on our characters’ faces, and the pleasingly organic sound warbles across the channels; then, visual flashes of two men thought to have perished in the boat come into the assemblage, and the remaining plot’s Lynchian identity panic ensues. Liam and Nick step off the boat in none other than 1993 (as seen on a local newspaper’s cover), the town flush with activity, reams of fish being gutted for processing and sale on the shore, and the pubs full of revellers. The former settles into a new domestic relationship with characters echoed in the first half, whilst Nick’s new identity painfully takes away his independence as a father, and is assumed to be the son of a grieving local couple (Adrian Rawlins and the director’s partner, Mary Woodvine).

This paradox of identity and temporality is unresolved – are we to take it literally, and is the audience supposed to project a tragic or uplifting resonance onto the events? What’s more definite is that Jenkin’s fantastical vision of his home evokes how it really feels – its essential nature – in an anti-empirical sense: haunted, folkloric, and equally dead and alive.

Rose of Nevada is a UK production staged by Bosena. Its world sales are handled by Protagonist Pictures.