Cornish patsies

The first shot of Jenkin’s film brought a huge smile to my face. The quality was all I’d hoped for and its apparent sharpness was almost shocking. I knew I was sitting quietly alone with a truly cinematic work of art and just overjoyed to be in its company for a few hours… I have no knowledge of what level of digital alteration of the image took place in post if any but if Jenkin is as authentic as he seems to be, it was probably graded the ‘old-fashioned’ way if ‘colour timing’ is even practically possible nowadays. Apparently, his footage was pushed to its very limit in terms of the colours it could reproduce. This is evident from frame one.

Rose of Nevada starts with a series of shots, mundane in subject matter but with an evocative central idea forming through the images’ cumulative effect. Have you ever walked on a beach or around a harbour of a fishing village? Invariably you’ll find discarded buoys, protective rubber tyres which once kept a boat’s flanks free of stone quay impact marks. You won’t have to look far to discover discarded netting, old rusted pulleys and, half locked and buried in the sand, rusted hulls and hulks of boats long since worn smooth by the elements. The one element of Jenkins’ extraordinary film that courses through this first bright and colourful sequence, is quite invisible… But you really feel it. It is time. The phrase to ‘weather the storm’ suggests survival, an ability to bear hardships with fortitude. Jenkin presents weather and time as an inevitable partnership and how these natural, all-powerful forces can dismantle and ossify what was once vital to people’s livelihoods. In this milieu of sharp, sea-scented imagery sits a boat with telling evidence of being rapidly abandoned. A photo of a loved one is cellotaped to one of its flimsy walls, the cramped living conditions, ruffled and sparse. There’s rust and wear but there’s also a name plate, the name of a fishing vessel lost at sea thirty years ago and somehow it has returned to the small Cornish village whose inhabitants were traumatised by the loss of two lives connected to the disappearence of the vessel. Ironically and tragically, you could say the place is drowning in grief. What was once a bustling fishing town with full to bursting pubs and a shining white fronted Post Office, is now a ghost town, run-down, mostly derelict and populated by a sparse number of villagers who’ve remained and retained, woven through their lives, the impact of the tragedy. The name of the boat is Rose of Nevada.

Sensing a profitable opportunity with another damaged but repairable boat available for fishing duties, two men are drawn to this small, battered 30 year-old relic. Nick is married and trying to provide for his wife and young daughter while his small, sea-salt corroded house is falling to pieces. The other is Liam, an itinerant homeless labourer looking for work to offset the aimlessness of his life. They join an experienced fishing captain staying at sea for days maximising their catch and return to the village which has undergone a startling transformation. Now well populated, lively and full of hope and small town ambition, this once pitiable place, so crushed by communal grief, is now urgent and alive.  Nick and Liam don’t quite understand where they now find themselves. It’s the same town but 30 years ago, before the deaths of the two men ripped the heart from its chest. Unknowingly, Liam and Nick suddenly find themselves to be incarnations of the dead men and while one accepts the new/old reality, the other rebels. Nick, like any sane man, cannot bring himself to believe his overwhelmed senses.

A full synopsis, in this film’s case, is not helpful. For Rose of Nevada, less is infinitely more. The exquisite joy of the film is not so much connecting the dots of the surrealistic and supernatural narrative. It’s holding those dots in your mind and waiting for signposts and pay offs to reveal themselves. It’s like unbidden thoughts evoked by a gifted filmmaker, many of which fire simultaneously as if your mind is suddenly in tandem with the artist’s own. There’s a word for this experience.

Cinema.

We get plenty of mystery and unresolved events which can sometimes be explained by dreams or hallucinations but no such hoary, clichéd idea containers are needed. This film shouldn’t make sense, it should feel sense. It’s an emotional work that defies logic on its own terms but with undercurrents of profound grief and loss and the effect time has on those affected. As human beings we have very different responses to time and can often be brought up short by facts which feel impossible. Sharks were swimming in the world’s oceans before Saturn had its rings. But my favourite example of how we distort time in our minds is that Ghostbusters is as far from the reign of Adolf Hitler as we are now from Ghostbusters… Rose of Nevada is a film about time, our responses to time and the inbuilt examination of time that the filmmaker believes is only available to the primate known as ‘homo sapiens’. At this time in our evolving history, the Latin for ‘wise man’ needs some serious updating. Despite the size of our brains, we’ve lost our collective wisdom along the way and being led by ‘homo narcissisticus’ isn’t helping. From one Republican elephant to the real thing…  While pachyderms may have a working memory, zoological studies, to my knowledge, have not been able to prove that any other living creature has a relationship with time as we have. As Jenkin says in that Sight and Sound interview, “Humanity’s greatest gift is that we can jump around in time. We’re really the only living thing that can do that which is probably our biggest curse as well… …I think we had to invent cinema to try and make sense of the way our minds worked. That’s what cinema can do so beautifully.”