Vinterburg: Far From The Madding Crowd (2015)

Far From The Madding Crowd is an adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s novel of the same name, and revolves around the plight of Bathsheba Everdene (Carey Mulligan), a landowner of independent means who finds herself forced to choose between three very different suitors – Gabriel Oak (Matthias Schoenhaerts), a loyal and attentive neighbour who subsequently becomes her employee, William Boldwood (Michael Sheen), an older member of the landed gentry, and Frank Troy (Tom Sturridge), a Sergeant who commences his courtship while stationed in her corner of Wessex. Despite a fairly lavish promotional campaign and a few lush interludes, it’s a film that’s defined above all by its naturalism, or by its particular brand of naturalism, since Vinterburg is just as keen to avoid the stylised neonaturalism of, say, Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights as he is anxious to distance himself from costume drama sentimentality, falling back upon a more mundane vision, an eye for plainness, that adapts Hardy as a realist rather than the latter-day romanticist he so often seems to become when translated to the big screen. For all the romantic deliberation, prevarication and agitation, Vinterburg, like Hardy, never allows himself the luxury of staying away from everyday life for any great length of time, with virtually every scene taking place in the midst of labour or as a transaction of some kind, suffused with a pervasive pastoral rhythm that’s not about bucolically idealising the countrside – no small feat for a film that takes place almost entirely outdoors – so much as subsuming even the most dramatic human moments into the change of seasons and the demands of Bathsheba’s farm. As a result, the major events occur quite matter-of-factly - neither telegraphed not allowed to take you completely by surprise, they unfold with that quantum of happenstance, or circumstance, that’s so central to Hardy’s worldview. Yet it’s also central to the Dogme ’95 worldview as well, which is perhaps why this feels like the closest Vinterburg has come to the austerity and humanity of Festen, as well as a manifesto of sorts for how Dogme looks now, a vision of Dogme ‘15. In particular, Hardy’s taste for a certain kind of female sadness – the impasse of a woman trying “to define her feelings in a language chiefly made by men to express theirs” – syncs up perfectly with the classical Dogme heroine, whose inchoate yearnings typically transcend or elude conventional film language. On the one hand, that allows Vinterburg to capture something like the full radicality of Hardy’s vision, its yearning to transcend itself in the name of something totally outside the conventions of married life, with  radical possibilities of both singledom and polyamoury glimpsed at various points throughout the film. At the same time, it refashions – or refines – Dogme as a Hardyesque invitation to women to appear before the camera just as they are, before the demands of realism stylise all their deepest melancholias out of existence – an invitation that Carey Mulligan accepts as if she’s been waiting for it for years, in one of the the greatest and saddest performances of her career.