Thou Wast Mild and Lovely + Director Q+A

London Film Festival 2014. ICA Cinema, 10/10/2014
Thou Wast Mild and Lovely is one of two films brought to the LFF by director Josephine Decker. It tells the story of Akin, who is hired for the summer to help Jeremiah and daughter Sarah at their farm. Though the married Akin is mocked mercilessly by her father for his perceived unmasculine ways, a bond develops between him and Sarah, which is consummated one day out in the fields. The trio's increasingly odd behaviour comes to a violent climax at a gathering in the third act.
The (Kentucky?) countryside is idealised, all primary colours and soft-edged - the human protagonists by contrast introduce coarse tools, violence, manipulation and animal lust, and commune ecstatically with the pure earth. The film is shot with a very narrow focal plane throughout, guiding the viewer's eye around each scene while emphasising the insular and oppressive feeling around the apparently isolated farm. We get fleeting glimpses of things that may or may not be central to the plot. Ambient sounds are amplified, at times drowning out the dialogue, so we often only hear fragments of dialogue. The cumulative effect is to engage the audience to seek their own truth about the background of the story, be it Jeremiah's true relationship to Sarah, what happened to previous workers at the farm, and the characters' motivations. For me the voiceover by Sarah which begins and ends the film doesn't really tally with the rest of the film which seems to follow Akin's perspective (with the exception of the hilarious bovine POV scene). 
Nevertheless, in only her second feature Decker dips her toes into the impressionist lexicon used by directors like Terence Malick and Shane Carruth and applies it in a more linear (some would say more coherent) fashion to very impressive genre bending effect with humour, drama and unflinching violence. I look forward to seeing where she goes next.