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| Images courtesy of Searchlight Pictures |
Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet, the husband-wife writer-director
team behind The Childhood of a Leader, Vox Lux and most recently
the VistaVision epic The Brutalist are hitting their visionary provocateur
stride. Not even a year after their
Oscar nominated 3½ hour epic about the immigration experience of a brutalist
architect, they’re back with an equally provocative 70mm musical meditation of
sorts on the 1747 English Shakers or Shaking Quakers entitled The Testament
of Ann Lee. As with The Brutalist,
the film went out theatrically in New York and Los Angeles in December before
expanding to a nationwide release in January.
The film, a beautifully dour and splendor filled widescreen historical period epic chronicling the life of Shakers co-founder and eventual leader Ann Lee played in a career best performance by Amanda Seyfried, is an intoxicating and achingly emotional sensory experience recreating a religious sect long lost to time and tide featuring against patriarchal standards a woman as its beacon. Credited to Mona Fastvold as the sole director whereas prior projects were credited to her husband Brady Corbet though both share the workload, it represents a strikingly bold, committed exercise and further continuation of the writing-directing team’s captivating debunking of the so-called American Dream.
Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is born in Manchester 1736 into an impoverished life of cotton factory work with her gay younger brother William (Lewis Pullman). After witnessing her parents copulating and calling them out at the dinner table for it setting off a retaliatory lashing, Ann grows into a more reverent young woman who one day with William and their niece Nancy (Viola Prettejohn) takes a chance visit to the home of a pair of Quakers preaching the Second Coming of Jesus. In a style of worship consisting of shouting, gyrating, singing and dancing, their belief is the lord will return in the form of a woman. Spending a lot of time with the Shaking Quakers, she falls into an abusive domineering S&M marriage with fellow worshipper Abraham (Christopher Abbott) and four of their newborn children die off, cementing her disgust and dispensing with her sexuality altogether.
Following local noise complaints over the chanting and an arrest over disturbing the peace, Ann experiences a spiritual metaphysical vision and upon disclosing it to her fellow Shakers they determine she is the female Messiah. Drifting in and out of musical numbers either really practiced or imagined in the hearts and minds of the practitioners and emphasis on rhythmic staccato breathing and body movements, namely arms sharply extending out and beating against the heart and chest with open palms, Ann now renamed ‘Mother Ann’ and her followers inevitably run into trouble as they try to spread the word. After a violent confrontation with an angry mob and in what is emerging as a recurring theme in Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s narratives, Mother Ann and her followers decide to emigrate to the United States with all the ugly fallout and upheaval that followed their arrival including but not limited to accusations of witchcraft and more vigilante mobs.
The film, a beautifully dour and splendor filled widescreen historical period epic chronicling the life of Shakers co-founder and eventual leader Ann Lee played in a career best performance by Amanda Seyfried, is an intoxicating and achingly emotional sensory experience recreating a religious sect long lost to time and tide featuring against patriarchal standards a woman as its beacon. Credited to Mona Fastvold as the sole director whereas prior projects were credited to her husband Brady Corbet though both share the workload, it represents a strikingly bold, committed exercise and further continuation of the writing-directing team’s captivating debunking of the so-called American Dream.
Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried) is born in Manchester 1736 into an impoverished life of cotton factory work with her gay younger brother William (Lewis Pullman). After witnessing her parents copulating and calling them out at the dinner table for it setting off a retaliatory lashing, Ann grows into a more reverent young woman who one day with William and their niece Nancy (Viola Prettejohn) takes a chance visit to the home of a pair of Quakers preaching the Second Coming of Jesus. In a style of worship consisting of shouting, gyrating, singing and dancing, their belief is the lord will return in the form of a woman. Spending a lot of time with the Shaking Quakers, she falls into an abusive domineering S&M marriage with fellow worshipper Abraham (Christopher Abbott) and four of their newborn children die off, cementing her disgust and dispensing with her sexuality altogether.
Following local noise complaints over the chanting and an arrest over disturbing the peace, Ann experiences a spiritual metaphysical vision and upon disclosing it to her fellow Shakers they determine she is the female Messiah. Drifting in and out of musical numbers either really practiced or imagined in the hearts and minds of the practitioners and emphasis on rhythmic staccato breathing and body movements, namely arms sharply extending out and beating against the heart and chest with open palms, Ann now renamed ‘Mother Ann’ and her followers inevitably run into trouble as they try to spread the word. After a violent confrontation with an angry mob and in what is emerging as a recurring theme in Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold’s narratives, Mother Ann and her followers decide to emigrate to the United States with all the ugly fallout and upheaval that followed their arrival including but not limited to accusations of witchcraft and more vigilante mobs.
A sort of scope widescreen musical companion piece of sorts to The Brutalist for its scathing regard for the immigration experience and how religious sects can be weaponized against and/or phased out with chicanery, a feral feminist howl against carnal exploitation of the flesh and spirit, a tour-de-force of choreography and blocking by Vox Lux choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall with stunningly rendered musical numbers you’ve never seen or heard anything remotely like before, The Testament of Ann Lee is one of the boldest historical dramas in recent memory. Featuring a completely fearless performance from Amanda Seyfried bordering between fiery passion and reckless abandonment who is giving a top-to-bottom physical performance from head to toe, watching and hearing her in motion onscreen in this is simply extraordinary.
From William Rexer’s dark yet luminous cinematography to The Brutalist composer Daniel Blumberg’s cacophony of songs and atonal minimalist medieval strumming with occasional anachronistic leanings into the electric guitar and thundering percussion, the soundscape of The Testament of Ann Lee is exhilarating and arresting. Terrifying even, especially in a sequence that completely reminded me of a key sequence in Elem Klimov’s WWII horror show Come and See and must’ve been an homage, the use of sound and music reminiscent at times of the Dessners’ songs for Joe Wright’s Cyrano. Editing and pacing is much faster than The Brutalist with some occasional hyperkinetic montages exquisitely rendered by Sofía Subercaseaux and attention to costume and production design feels appropriately archaic and not necessarily glamorous.
Currently in limited theatrical release and presented on 35mm, 70mm and IMAX formats in some theaters, The Testament of Ann Lee is very plainly not going to be for all tastes. As a painterly historical drama, this one sneaks past your comfort zones and pushes buttons pretty early on with wailing and screaming at a Quaker session asking the audience whether or not it is willing to continue with two more hours of it. Irrespective of your enjoyment or lack thereof, it is plain as can see Amanda Seyfried is commanding and wielding performative fire in the titular role of Ann Lee.
Maybe the bravest, most daringly freeing
performance in an equally strange provocation since Emma Stone’s Oscar winning
turn in Poor Things (also co-starring Christopher Abbott as an
alpha-male heavy), Seyfried is extraordinary in scenes that sometimes run for
minutes on end without cuts. A
historical document as feminist allegory, a commentary on modern politics and a
piece of performance art whose closest antecedents might be Climax or The Severing, The Testament of Ann Lee is a stunning wholly original
cinematic creation with breathtaking power and scope. Easily one of the best new releases of the
year!
--Andrew Kotwicki