Myth Happens

The one flaw in David Rudkin's The Ash Tree (1975) is the same one I just saw avoided in Mark Gatiss' The Tractate Middoth (2013): it shows too much. Not that it ruins the climax of the story, but I would have done better merely hearing the soft cries, uneasily childlike, and seeing the flickers of movement in the limbs of the ash-tree, bending its shadow across the desk of the protagonist as he sits up too late with his thoughts, playing the same doomed game of sortilege as his ancestor: Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be. The BBC could have held the special effects and come in under budget for once. The atmosphere is everything in this story and it didn't need the assist.

Edward Petherbridge is excellent, playing a double role: in the mid-1700's, the new Sir Richard of Castringham, lately arrived from the Continent ("He isn't pale enough for a lord!") to claim his inheritance upon his childless uncle's death; and his uncle's uncle, Sir Matthew Fell, who presided over the countryside in the days of the witch-hunts. He seems to be presiding still. His portrait hangs at the head of the stairs, staring pale as his Puritan collar. Voices call his name in the night, their cape-and-capotain silhouettes standing out against the moonlit panes like some history lesson in shadowplay. Times slide and blur, night and afternoon; Richard opens his mouth to speak of a new church pew and finds himself pronouncing a woman's death. Their voices echo in and out of one another, the same light, incisive temper. He should hardly be a haunted man. As craning and fey as Petherbridge can look, Richard is a vital newcomer, his hands assured on his horse's reins or his charcoals as he sketches Italianate improvements on his ancestral hall like a less self-absorbed version of Greenaway's draughtsman. He reads Fielding's Tom Jones and hangs suggestively intimate etchings where his ancestors' plain portraits once gazed down; he plans to install his fiancée, the smart Augusta, as soon the wedding can be decently arranged. The past should have no hold on him, ghosting and bodiless as it is. And yet, isn't it sensuality at the heart of this haunting? Sir Matthew was beguiled once by a yellow-haired woman smiling by a stream—and denounced her for running in her "night-shape" as a hare. I cannot believe it. But what I saw ye do, that I saw. And that have I had to testify.

It's a beautiful production, as carefully composed in its tableaux as Jarman's Caravaggio (1986). The witch put to the question gleams like a saint in an oil painting, her naked body sweat-streaked, soot-stained, her face all contempt for the squire's apologizing. A branch scrapes a window with a squeak of twigs and glass, but the rhythm is a lover's fingers, caressing to be allowed in. The witchfinders' drumbeat paces the moors like the heartbeat that has never gone out of the land. (And perhaps she was a witch when she died, Anne Mothersole; perhaps not. But certainly in the years since her hanging, she has had time to become one.) Especially given the doubling, the film takes a greater risk than I would have expected, relying on the viewer's ability to tell the two times apart even as so much of the story is their fatal merging—at points it's impossible to tell which squire of Castringham is speaking or seeing and it's a controlled, deliberate effect. The costumes help, but only when we can see them. The ash-tree helps nothing. The leaves rustle the same against the night sky.

In other words, handful_ofdust, if you haven't seen this: it's for you. Its only misstep for me really is those few moments near the end when we've already got the idea; we don't need it spelled out for us. It recovers for the final image, though, and ends with a true sting. And possibly I shouldn't have watched it last thing before bed, but I'll be distracted by Arisia in the morning. I am not playing sortes with anything before then.