I don't only have an affinity for the ocean. I like forests and marshes; I am very fond of mountains; I have spent quality time in lakes, generally the New England kind that are cold even in late summer. Behind my parents' house is a reservoir in which I swam as a child, open-eyed in silt-green water. Nine years ago, staying with friends in a cabin, I swam in another lake after dark, in the rain, rowed badly at night and stargazed from the dock. Perry Blackshear's The Rusalka (2018) evoked all of these memories for me, both sides of the water. As well as a kind of chamber meditation on grief, love, and monstrosity, it's a sense-of-place story and its genius loci will drown you.
Taking its tone from Nietzsche's aphorism that "what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil," the film is not a direct retelling of any one rusalka story—Lermontov, Pushkin, Dvořák—so much as a contemporary translation of the folklore stripped down to its stickly, algal bones: a girl drowned for love, water-bound to drown others in turn. It's a story that obsesses Al (MacLeod Andrews) as he sits up over his piano and his workbench, his pale, sharp face grown over with the unkempt beard of a monk or a letter-bomber; his husband died in the quiet, scenic Vermont lake they lived by and the grief-haunted widower has not only come to believe that just such a supernatural creature was responsible, he's sworn to avenge his love. It seems unlikely that Tom (Evan Dumouchel) ever heard of rusalky in his native North Carolina, where he was raised by the kind of cloistered, evangelical church that is just now sending him out into the world; sweet-faced and surprisingly cut under his missionary's white shirt and dark suit, he's spending a few days alone in a lakeside summer rental before heading to Europe. What Nina (Margaret Ying Drake) knows, we almost don't have to ask from the first moment we see her half-profiled in the wet beam of Tom's flashlight, the black tangles of her hair and the black waters of the lake the same pure negative space, but she has a light millennial voice and a cute scrunch of a slightly apologetic smile and her courtship of Tom, if that's what you want to call their hesitant, darting rapport of wet handprints left on concrete and bike flashers presented as earnestly as flowers and swimming lessons conducted in the sunlit shallows of the always lapping lake, does not feel even wistfully like a lure. Her eyes blink open black as a shark's, the lake turns blood-red in her sight. When she tries to pry her foot from the water, it judders as in the grip of a seizure or an event horizon. There are bones lying under the pale roots of sedge and pickerel weed, a dented tin tea caddy full of the jewelry of the drowned—watches and earrings, a heavy bronze love-knot swinging on a verdigris chain. "I don't eat meat," she declines an optimistically charred cookout hamburger, then awkwardly shreds it into the water when reassured it's a veggie burger. She checks her reflection in a broken-off fender mirror wedged among the roots of a willow tree. It is easy to imagine a version of this story where Nina is the seductive demon, Al the righteous avenger; another where she's the tormented wild thing and he the monster of patriarchy; in neither would Tom have the strange, dangerous, headlong agency that he does, the fairy-tale innocent who doesn't know how to shudder. Everyone here is a shape-changer without special effects, only the profound and practical effect of love. Tom ignores a landline call from one of his church's elders after his smartphone gets bricked, climbing out the cabin window half-tangled in the phone cord to answer the signal flashing from the late-summer covert of leaves on the other side of the lake while the voice in his ear runs on about snares and straying from the path; Nina surprised at the lake's edge finds herself menaced by a suspicious, self-terrified Al, who can't believe afterward that he just threatened his new neighbor's maybe-girlfriend with a machete. It took all her strength to drag Tom gasping from the sun-smashed water where a moment before she held him thrashing and twisting under, fighting herself back to human and harmless. You don't know if it will be enough, what she feels for him, but no one ever knows that. Conversationally, a dreadful slewing rumble in her voice like two people speaking through the same small throat, she meets a man's gaze and says, "You should run now."
There's an inevitable pulse of violence in this film, but I would not classify it as horror; atmospherically as well as narratively, it's less creature feature than liminal, melancholy fairy tale. Blackshear not only wrote and directed but served as DP and the cinematography of The Rusalka is suffused with the green shadows of Nina's lake, breath-silver with bubbles, ember-skimmed with the cooling iron of the sunset sky. Its nature photography never falls prey to thinking it needs to be pretty, whether it's looking at a shiver of wind on a wooded hillside, the rain-weighted ripple of leaves, or Nina with her face turned against a tree's bark, her hair stranded black as blood-knots; it's as interested as Tarkovsky's camera in the textures of earth and water and the ways that humans can look either terribly out of place or terribly at home lying among trampled reeds, sitting on the edge of a dock, floating in the sun-hazed eel-gloom of a lake's bed. Dreams, memories, and fantasies bleed through the contemporary action as unpromptedly and obliquely as real thoughts, building a kind of background static of longing and loss amplified by the folk-choral soundtrack of the Kitka Women's Vocal Ensemble. Does a flash of Tom with his skin drowned blue, his eyes all-black as the rusalka, point forward to a happy ending or a nightmare? Aren't the letters Al narrates to his dead husband (played in glimpses by Blackshear, most adorably in a video clip that tells us almost wordlessly what Al lost when a girl's slender-nailed hands, strong enough to crumble a stone like a handful of mud, gripped ginger-bearded Michael by the throat and held him down until he was just "meat and dirt at the bottom of the lake") just another kind of unrequitable love between worlds? I love that in a deliberate twist on Andersen and Kvapil, it is the male, mortal Tom who is without voice, mute since a childhood accident in a river left him with an understandable fear of water; I love that the camera frequently eyes him shirtless, while Nina as the water spirit in the relationship is never animalistically or even just male-default sexualized, her factual beauty separate from whether her wet T-shirts cling. Her binding to the water she died in is expressed with nothing more than blocking and the same skillfully uncanny sound design that characterizes the film. The sound of her drowning rage is a big cat's snarl, more startling and out of place than any alligator's bellow; forcing herself out of the lake, she crumples under the awful gravity of her nature with a dry, splitting snap that sounds less like bones than branches. I thought at more than one point in this movie of Gian Carlo Menotti's "The Black Swan"—eyes of glass and feet of stone, shells for teeth and weeds for tongue, deep, deep down in the river's bed. It feels both folklorically correct and absurdly, poignantly decorous that when our element-crossed lovers finally come together, she keeps one foot always in the water, as the Hays Code might have it. The PCA probably wouldn't have endorsed the film's ending, but it is exactly the sort of thing I write, so it's got my certificate of approval.
I saw this film last night at IFFBoston with Dumouchel in attendance; I am grateful that my bus schedule just barely allowed me to stay for the short Q&A afterward because it confirmed as intentional a couple of decisions that had intrigued me and also gave me the chance to tell the actor-producer that I have a high bar for water folklore and his film cleared it easily. It is much less like Cat People (1942) or Night Tide (1961) than I may have made it sound. It's sweet as well as somber, sometimes warmly funny, as when Tom gingerly dares to approach a rowboat or Nina wonders aloud whether her lake-blooded state can metabolize alcohol. Because there's so little dialogue, it matters what the actors say and how they say it and it also matters that many of the most powerful moments need no one to say anything at all. I was transfixed by the choked ache with which Nina all but throws away the line "I'm not what you think I am," but even more by her vision of reading side-by-side in bed with a lover, he with the Bantam paperback of Campbell's Myths to Live By, she with a jacketless hardcover of Tolstoy's The Law of Love and the Law of Violence. For people in the Boston area who find the idea of a minimalist but not affectless indie take on love and drowning appealing, there is one screening left on Monday at the Somerville Theatre and I encourage you to it. It runs 80 minutes and was an excellent thing to wait for a bus in a pelting thunderstorm to see. This folkway brought to you by my lacustrine backers at Patreon.
Taking its tone from Nietzsche's aphorism that "what is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil," the film is not a direct retelling of any one rusalka story—Lermontov, Pushkin, Dvořák—so much as a contemporary translation of the folklore stripped down to its stickly, algal bones: a girl drowned for love, water-bound to drown others in turn. It's a story that obsesses Al (MacLeod Andrews) as he sits up over his piano and his workbench, his pale, sharp face grown over with the unkempt beard of a monk or a letter-bomber; his husband died in the quiet, scenic Vermont lake they lived by and the grief-haunted widower has not only come to believe that just such a supernatural creature was responsible, he's sworn to avenge his love. It seems unlikely that Tom (Evan Dumouchel) ever heard of rusalky in his native North Carolina, where he was raised by the kind of cloistered, evangelical church that is just now sending him out into the world; sweet-faced and surprisingly cut under his missionary's white shirt and dark suit, he's spending a few days alone in a lakeside summer rental before heading to Europe. What Nina (Margaret Ying Drake) knows, we almost don't have to ask from the first moment we see her half-profiled in the wet beam of Tom's flashlight, the black tangles of her hair and the black waters of the lake the same pure negative space, but she has a light millennial voice and a cute scrunch of a slightly apologetic smile and her courtship of Tom, if that's what you want to call their hesitant, darting rapport of wet handprints left on concrete and bike flashers presented as earnestly as flowers and swimming lessons conducted in the sunlit shallows of the always lapping lake, does not feel even wistfully like a lure. Her eyes blink open black as a shark's, the lake turns blood-red in her sight. When she tries to pry her foot from the water, it judders as in the grip of a seizure or an event horizon. There are bones lying under the pale roots of sedge and pickerel weed, a dented tin tea caddy full of the jewelry of the drowned—watches and earrings, a heavy bronze love-knot swinging on a verdigris chain. "I don't eat meat," she declines an optimistically charred cookout hamburger, then awkwardly shreds it into the water when reassured it's a veggie burger. She checks her reflection in a broken-off fender mirror wedged among the roots of a willow tree. It is easy to imagine a version of this story where Nina is the seductive demon, Al the righteous avenger; another where she's the tormented wild thing and he the monster of patriarchy; in neither would Tom have the strange, dangerous, headlong agency that he does, the fairy-tale innocent who doesn't know how to shudder. Everyone here is a shape-changer without special effects, only the profound and practical effect of love. Tom ignores a landline call from one of his church's elders after his smartphone gets bricked, climbing out the cabin window half-tangled in the phone cord to answer the signal flashing from the late-summer covert of leaves on the other side of the lake while the voice in his ear runs on about snares and straying from the path; Nina surprised at the lake's edge finds herself menaced by a suspicious, self-terrified Al, who can't believe afterward that he just threatened his new neighbor's maybe-girlfriend with a machete. It took all her strength to drag Tom gasping from the sun-smashed water where a moment before she held him thrashing and twisting under, fighting herself back to human and harmless. You don't know if it will be enough, what she feels for him, but no one ever knows that. Conversationally, a dreadful slewing rumble in her voice like two people speaking through the same small throat, she meets a man's gaze and says, "You should run now."
There's an inevitable pulse of violence in this film, but I would not classify it as horror; atmospherically as well as narratively, it's less creature feature than liminal, melancholy fairy tale. Blackshear not only wrote and directed but served as DP and the cinematography of The Rusalka is suffused with the green shadows of Nina's lake, breath-silver with bubbles, ember-skimmed with the cooling iron of the sunset sky. Its nature photography never falls prey to thinking it needs to be pretty, whether it's looking at a shiver of wind on a wooded hillside, the rain-weighted ripple of leaves, or Nina with her face turned against a tree's bark, her hair stranded black as blood-knots; it's as interested as Tarkovsky's camera in the textures of earth and water and the ways that humans can look either terribly out of place or terribly at home lying among trampled reeds, sitting on the edge of a dock, floating in the sun-hazed eel-gloom of a lake's bed. Dreams, memories, and fantasies bleed through the contemporary action as unpromptedly and obliquely as real thoughts, building a kind of background static of longing and loss amplified by the folk-choral soundtrack of the Kitka Women's Vocal Ensemble. Does a flash of Tom with his skin drowned blue, his eyes all-black as the rusalka, point forward to a happy ending or a nightmare? Aren't the letters Al narrates to his dead husband (played in glimpses by Blackshear, most adorably in a video clip that tells us almost wordlessly what Al lost when a girl's slender-nailed hands, strong enough to crumble a stone like a handful of mud, gripped ginger-bearded Michael by the throat and held him down until he was just "meat and dirt at the bottom of the lake") just another kind of unrequitable love between worlds? I love that in a deliberate twist on Andersen and Kvapil, it is the male, mortal Tom who is without voice, mute since a childhood accident in a river left him with an understandable fear of water; I love that the camera frequently eyes him shirtless, while Nina as the water spirit in the relationship is never animalistically or even just male-default sexualized, her factual beauty separate from whether her wet T-shirts cling. Her binding to the water she died in is expressed with nothing more than blocking and the same skillfully uncanny sound design that characterizes the film. The sound of her drowning rage is a big cat's snarl, more startling and out of place than any alligator's bellow; forcing herself out of the lake, she crumples under the awful gravity of her nature with a dry, splitting snap that sounds less like bones than branches. I thought at more than one point in this movie of Gian Carlo Menotti's "The Black Swan"—eyes of glass and feet of stone, shells for teeth and weeds for tongue, deep, deep down in the river's bed. It feels both folklorically correct and absurdly, poignantly decorous that when our element-crossed lovers finally come together, she keeps one foot always in the water, as the Hays Code might have it. The PCA probably wouldn't have endorsed the film's ending, but it is exactly the sort of thing I write, so it's got my certificate of approval.
I saw this film last night at IFFBoston with Dumouchel in attendance; I am grateful that my bus schedule just barely allowed me to stay for the short Q&A afterward because it confirmed as intentional a couple of decisions that had intrigued me and also gave me the chance to tell the actor-producer that I have a high bar for water folklore and his film cleared it easily. It is much less like Cat People (1942) or Night Tide (1961) than I may have made it sound. It's sweet as well as somber, sometimes warmly funny, as when Tom gingerly dares to approach a rowboat or Nina wonders aloud whether her lake-blooded state can metabolize alcohol. Because there's so little dialogue, it matters what the actors say and how they say it and it also matters that many of the most powerful moments need no one to say anything at all. I was transfixed by the choked ache with which Nina all but throws away the line "I'm not what you think I am," but even more by her vision of reading side-by-side in bed with a lover, he with the Bantam paperback of Campbell's Myths to Live By, she with a jacketless hardcover of Tolstoy's The Law of Love and the Law of Violence. For people in the Boston area who find the idea of a minimalist but not affectless indie take on love and drowning appealing, there is one screening left on Monday at the Somerville Theatre and I encourage you to it. It runs 80 minutes and was an excellent thing to wait for a bus in a pelting thunderstorm to see. This folkway brought to you by my lacustrine backers at Patreon.
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