Callum Turner has been tipped to take up the James Bond mantle for a while now. In “Rose of Nevada,” he plays a working-class fisherman, and unfortunately, his features are incompatible with anyone of that class. He has, let’s say, the face of someone who’d be married to a pop star.
Jokes aside, he and the ever-great George MacKay play two fishermen living in a remote Cornish village. They decide to make a bit of cash aboard the Rose of Nevada, which also gives the film its name. When they get back to dry land, both Nick (MacKay) and Liam (Turner) realize life isn’t what it was. In fact, they’ve really gone back in time some 30 years, landing in 1993.
Out of Time
This time-travel plot is already a bit played out. If in “Back to the Future” or “The Terminator” there were metaphysical rules like not being able to talk to your past self or trying to kill baby Hitler, Mark Jenkin’s film is more interested in the quiet, almost apathetic life its residents lead in the face of the past’s trauma. Three decades earlier, two fishermen fell victim to a tragedy that shook the whole village. It was one it never recovered from.
Jenkin shoots on 16mm, with a Bolex camera, and the result runs short on conventional narrative devices. The cuts look handmade, from one scene to the next. As in Bait and Enys Men, his films are as independent and austere as they come. Characters are positioned without moving much, with big shots of landscape and still life. The almost square ratio he shoots in makes everything feel handcrafted. In addition, his talent intoxicates and leaves the story claustrophobic.
While the idea of never seeing his wife and daughter again haunts Nick, he and Liam end up taking on the identities of the two fishermen who were lost three decades earlier. The past here isn’t something they visit; it’s something they become. Moreover, as Liam becomes far more comfortable literally taking on another man’s wife and daughter, Nick spirals into something darker. He is tortured by feeling isolated in the middle of so many people.
There’s also another sailor along for the ride who can’t remember his own name, but who works as a kind of Charon for Nick and Liam, a figure from Greek mythology who ferried souls to Hades.
A Riddle
And as in Jenkin’s other films, these characters’ dilemmas don’t come alone, but paired with the claustrophobic sensory field he always leans on. There are long shots of waves rocking the boat, or the camera fixed on the back of someone’s neck. The direction makes sure you understand this village isn’t just small, it’s as if everyone lived in the same house. Maybe that’s just how communities like this are. Sometimes, in such isolated dynamics, everyone ends up depending on everyone else. As a result, it becomes hard to leave it all behind.
And near the end of the film, this is the riddle Nick will, one way or another, crack. Not only are they the only ones willing to fish that community’s livelihood out of the sea; they come to understand that everyone there matters and has a role to play. This is true whether it’s their own or inherited from someone else.
Two Borrowed Men
MacKay doesn’t just have a sad-puppy face; he looks like he spent the whole night out in the rain, barking for his owner. And it’s a delight to watch an actor this decorated, of his caliber, working in a film of such modest means. If in “1917” he was surrounded by a literal war, in those imposing, loud, magnificent shots, here, as Nick, he brings an inner suffering whose oppression now comes from the monotony of the community he lives in.
On the other side, Turner staggers around in that bad-boy bon vivant stereotype who, deep down, leads a very lonely life. If with Nick the story anchors in the pressure to provide for his family and the risk of never seeing them again, Turner’s Liam is two-dimensional. He works more as an amoral counterpoint to his fishing buddy than as a character who says anything on his own. It even gets a little awkward, because a vaguely incestuous relationship ends up forming around Turner’s character.
He Dawdles, Then He Hooks You
Another problem with the film is the director’s constant mannerisms. Jenkin loves those b-roll-ish shots that build the film’s atmosphere. Sure, there’s his signature: the ambient sound, the score, a clock noise and a tick-tock that sounds more like a ship’s horn. But he dawdles, and dawdles, and dawdles a little more. After an hour of this, your eyes start to tire. In fact, it almost borders on boredom.
But it’s when all these notes come together that he does what he does best: building atmosphere, as if the ceiling were about to cave in on the characters. Sometimes, it really does. From the very first moment, you know something is bothering each of them. With these devices, whether it’s the use of celluloid or a repetitive noise that breeds anxiety, Jenkin keeps leaving clues for us to untie the nautical knot a whole community is caught in.
The Rust Underneath
Whether it’s England in the 1990s, marked by the cynicism of a generation facing a strong wave of unemployment, or a nation grappling with Brexit, the situation may be the same. What can a single event reveal about everything around us?
“Rose of Nevada” isn’t for everyone. It isn’t a sci-fi or supernatural film concerned with the laws of physics. But Jenkin, like England itself, uses cinema, music and the stories of great heroes to call out a problem unfolding under everyone’s nose, an issue that is rusting a little more each day.
