From the archive: "Two Years at Sea"

Some movies take us away from it all by going big, allowing us to escape among the monsters and aliens of universes far, far away. Others do so by clinging assiduously to all things micro, paring back the frippery, VFX and other fun and games in a bid to show what life might look like if we actually dared to remove ourselves from such clutter. Shot on grainy, flaring monochrome stock apparently half-inched from some experimental filmmakers' co-op at the arse-end of the 1960s, Two Years at Sea - the artist Ben Rivers' non-fiction study of one hermit's life - falls squarely into the latter camp. Though an early shot of a letter establishes this hermit's name as Jake Williams, Rivers' refusal of narration, title cards or other framing devices leaves us to figure out his particulars for ourselves. Frequent snow suggests Williams has made his home - a gingerbread house deep in a forest, with a backyard full of junk - somewhere north of the Scottish border; the film will be dotted with photos of persons who may be family members, but the taciturn Williams is unwilling to introduce us (or even really acknowledge the camera), and Rivers has to respect him for that. We do too, sort of.

This viewer was reminded of the peaceable solitude of the Carmelite nuns whose lives were captured in the 2009 No Greater Love, a surprise arthouse crossover hit at the time, but Rivers' goal here is less observational than experiential: he wants to put the viewer in the same neck of the woods for eighty-odd minutes, and maybe even get us to inhabit this guy's headspace - to marvel at the natural world in the way that first led Jake Williams to take off on his tod, and not just because it happens to be the only element on screen for long stretches. Inevitably, this kind of filmmaking isn't for the antsy, and there is a kind of limitation inherent to this lifestyle. You may come away wanting a bit less beardy pottering and a shade more excitement, true as the former may be to this marginal figure's daily existence. The litmus test comes with a longish sequence in which we watch Williams painstakingly craft a raft from tree branches, packing foam and plastic bottles, then transport it on his shoulders to a nearby lake, where he pushes himself out into the middle so as to sit there doing, well, nothing very much at all, meaning a soundtrack layered with birds cooing and wind ruffling the trees has to take up the slack for five minutes. Rivers has expanded his vision in subsequent, busier projects (last year's A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, for one), but this remains memorable as one of those films that quietly opens up a window on some small, previously unfilmed corner of the world - no matter that you may value central heating and Freeview television enough not to leap through it for yourself.

(January 2014)

Two Years at Sea is available to rent via Prime Video and the BFI Player; a sequel of sorts, Bogancloch, opens in selected cinemas from Friday, and will be reviewed here in the days ahead.