Hot on the heels ”Brutalist,“Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet Has returned with another sweeping historical epic about a European iconoclast coming to America to build a new type of church. Even more exciting, ”The will of Ann Lee” – A speculative, feverish and absolutely scary biopics about the mancunic preacher who founded the shakes and believed to be the female incarnation of Christ on earth – addresses the most dazzling problem with last year’s story about the fictional architect László Tóth: It was not a musical.
“The will of Ann Lee” is also not a musical, to be fair. Sure, its characters are prone to singing and dancing as the Spirit grabs them (a divinely increased game on “shaking shakers” full body strategy for religious devotion), but filmEuphoric “movements” split much closer prayers than traditional numbers. Oscar-winning composer Daniel Blumberg transfigures a dozen traditional hymns to advancing and electrifying driving stops that drum with biblical joy, while “”Occasion“Choreographer Celia Rowlson Hall arranges the figures in Ann Lee’s near composite congregation until they form a human change to heaven that their” mother “hopes to create with them here on earth.
As in a more simple musical, Shaker’s song and dance use to express a number of emotions that Plainspoken -words could not hope to convey. But the cheering of these movements, and of the rest of Fastvold’s film beyond them-like, as well as “The Brutalist”, she wrote together with Life Partner Corbet-Has much less to do with any lyric content than with the arousing of collective harmony. With the orgiastic glory to create a shared purpose between people and the evangelical work to convert this purpose to action.
Fastvold may not be a shaker himself, which should not come so much surprisingly given that there is exactly three Of those who remained on the last bill (and only then because a new supporter joined the other two just weeks ago), but the “Testament of Ann Lee” is one of the most consistent ecstatic films I have ever seen just because it does not hang on the evangel’s truth. This is a movie defined by a deep respect for the faith of its name, but it is also a film driven by an even deeper appreciation for the more secular ideals she used her faith to strive for; It is remarkable as a proof of Ann Lee, and even more like a will to Her quasi-artistic ability to march people together in the service to create a better world.
In a way, the “Testament of Ann Lee” is a celebration of – and then in its less rhapsodic second half, a shallow for – the conditions required to make a movie like “Testament of Ann Lee.” Here is another crazy endeavor with shallow pockets and great ambitions (which looks like a mega-budget studio project thanks to production designs Sam Bader). It is another utopian prayer under the direction of a woman in a company dominated by men, a woman who in Fastvold’s case had to use a crew’s energy that is much larger than Ann Lee’s first congregation to fulfill her vision. Like “The Brutalist” before that (not to say anything about Fastvold’s heartbreaking big “The World to Come” before that), the film acts as a feasible alternative for how movies can be made. Just as Ann Lee’s positive message appeals to a Christian population that had become tired of being promised salvation through suffering, Fastvold and Corbet’s model offer a more actionable response to an industry that is ill from Hollywood judges.
Again, it takes a lot more than a few cheap Hungarian budget hacks to rollow the type of magic formula that Fastvold does here. For starters, there is only one Amanda Seyfried, whose moonstone eyes were made to convey religious happiness. The “first reformed” actress gives the best performance in her career as “the woman dressed by the sun”, her Ann Lee convincing longing for purpose even before she begins to create one for herself.
Located in the gray and unforgiving Manchester from 1736, the first episode of this movie is the story of a stylish soul trying to find a harmony between God (which she loves) and the church (who does not love her back). She finds a measure of creature’s comfort in her arms on her beaten but serious husband Abraham (a fantastic Christopher Abbott, who masterfully navigates in real affection and the male right of the 1700s), such as Ravishes Ann with a fetishist attention that his bride is not sure how he should get. For one thing, she is young and uneducated. For another, even worldly sinners who probably would be confused if our partners wanted to beat our naked donkeys with a broom when they read from the reveals’ book.
But Ann’s sexual ambivalence goes much deeper than old -fashioned kink. She first became skeptical of the subject as a little girl, when she was forced to look at her father shallow at the top of her mother just a few meters away, and that skepticism began to calculate a deeper distrust when her mother died during the delivery of her eighth child. For a woman who Ann is a marital sex a crucial part of confirming her Christian duty, but the feeling of self -reinforcement it provides is rhymed by the autonomy that “belongs to” her husband strips away from her in return.
These contradictory feelings come in the head in the film’s most astonishing sequence, a bay of sex, work, dance, anxiety, singing, death and grief where Ann delivers four children, no one survives in addition to childhood despite her desperate attempts to feed them with life. The choreography here is breathtakingly atmospheric; Elevated but not impassable, modern but faithful to the spirit of the Georgian era, which is suspended between the positions that Ann is between this world and the next. Of course, the experience has a soul-scar effect on Ann, who becomes convinced that her horrible trial is punishment for her sins of the flesh. “Our unbearable tragedies are God’s assessment of me,” she concludes before explaining that replacement is sacred and leads the first shakes for three days of spasmodic worship so intense that Sister Mary (Thomasin McKenzie) – Ann’s most devoted acolyte and this film’s storytelling – insists she would die.
Seyfried’s obsessed performance has not been carefully balanced between anxiety and ecstasy before it gradually begins to cloak closer to the latter. She is a study in unbroken expation, her body opens and leans upwards to heaven as if she was instructed from the sky, her every rhythmic breath is a kind of transubstantiation.
“The will of Ann Lee” would never hold together if not for the unmatched conviction that Seyfried gives its title character. Since a movie made for shaker would only stand for gross about $ 40 on most things, Fastvold understands that most viewers will not share Ann’s self -belief; What is more important is that we think Ann does. We can come to a more psychological reason for her prophetic awakening, which is clearly carried from the pain of her losses, but we are also dissatisfied with all cynicism in terms of sincerity in her faith (although we can question the long -term result of a religion that prohibits its followers to start families and ability their rank).
The people who are closest to Ann, especially her young brother William (an amazing Louis Pullman, robust and susceptible to the idea of a sibling Christ 2.0), have no problems accepting her as the only truth, and so that the film’s spectacular appearance other action takes to the sea as mother Ann and her two dozen supporters sailed for the new world. The boat set is where William Rexer’s 35mm cinematography really starts to shine, as the caravan-like interior in the first act contrasts with the violent gray-blue seas threatening to capsize the ship and drowning Ann’s Upstart religion in one case. The journey is a dangerous between two mutually antagonized countries, but Shaker’s shared purpose turns out to be their salvation and safely looks at Manhattan.
It is there, on the beaches of pre-revolutionary America, that “the will of Ann Lee” most neatly dizzy with “The Brutalist”, when Fastvold begins to exalt in the promise of a country still waiting to be born. America’s self -investment goes in parallel with Anns and rhymes with it in all its endeavor and battle. If (like “The Brutalist”), The Second Half of This Film Is A Much Slower, Darker, and Less Dynamic Meditation on the Events of the First, It’s Also Where Fastvold and Corbet’s Script’s Script Begins to Leamen America Has Alway Where – Can make it such a lighthouse of hope for the rest of the world.
Through the lens in the emerging Shaker community that Ann establishes near Albany (and where she instructs her followers to start making the furniture they still remember for today), we see this country a place based on the strength of collaboration, as well as a place that is vulnerable to the same provincial thinking from which it jumped to explain independently. The shakes thrive by trading with the local domestic population and from offering new ideas to frustrated white colonialists who had been conditioned on despair (embodied here by Tim Blake Nelson). They also suffer in the hands of brutal crowds that basically reject their presence, unaware of the irony to so violently betray the same rights that they have just fought a war to establish. A story as old as time.
Grace is a difficult thing to preserve, and the “Testament of Ann Lee” becomes a less visceral single experience when it goes from sanctifying the grace to mourners it. The music becomes less frequent, we begin to see Daniel Blumbs on the screen (a striking figure!) As much as we hear from him, and the clarity of Ann’s vision is obscured by the brutal surrounding it. As in most stories, the inevitable is not as convincing as the miraculous, and there is a complaint – however necessary and/or intentional – when he looked at the last act of Fastvold’s film, the infectious oak that carried so much of the first two, as if a film so controlled by Voices has suddenly dropped the tongue.
Of course, Ann would be quick to remind us that there is a place for everything and everything in her place. The ultimate brilliance in Fastvold’s film, which remains without a doubt for all its peaks and valleys, is that it has the courage to re -form the essence of belonging to itself; To see it not as something we find, but rather as something we create together.
Rating: A-
“Testament of Ann Lee” premiered by 2025 Venice Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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