FAR, FAR AWAY // A FILM REVIEW OF "THE WANTING MARE"
THE WANTING MARE is a visually stunningly triumph, a film that both has too many things going on and barely anything at all. It's a film that spent over five years creating a visually complex post-apocalyptic world, mostly shot on a soundstage in New Jersey. It's also a film that takes patience, A LOT of patience, to wade through what the filmmaker is actually trying to say. And even if you have the patience, you still may walk away with very little learned other than how fantastic the film looks.
Set in the world of Anmaere sometime in a broken future, The Wanting Mare tells the tale of two cities, connected, but vastly different. The city of Withren, where most of the film takes place, is a smog filled unending hot place where as the city of Levithen is covered in unending ice and snow. Neither sound exactly like paradise but if you live among the dilapidated city of Withren, a season in the snow sounds like just the ticket. In order to get there, that's exactly what you need: a ticket. Tickets to and from the cities are extremely rare and are such a hot commodity people kill for the chance to board a cargo ship, taking them to another life. In the land of eternal sweat lives a generation of women who share a dream of "the world before," before all of these extreme conditions. We begin seeing a woman who's just given birth, speaking of this shortly before she dies. We then jump forward in time to see the daughter Moira (Ashleigh Nutt) now a young woman and living by herself within the city of Withren. She travels to and from the main part of the city from her home each night and on one of those evenings she comes upon a wounded thief (played by writer/director Nicholas Ashe Bateman). They bond together and eventually fall for each other.
We don't stay in that time period for long, jumping forward again in time after the thief finds an abandoned baby and leaves it with Moira. After the jump, that child is now grown and we now follow Hadeon (Edmond Cofie) and his gang who steal tickets for the cargo trip to and from the cities. We check in on the child who spends her days dancing in a bask of blue light. We meet other characters, some grown versions of past, some who don't have much to do with the plot at all. All are beautifully lit and often have very little to say. We explore scene after scene of characters staring at each other with little to no dialogue. The often stilted and pained dialogue we do have does little to help with exposition and it's evident that the majority of the work has gone to creating the stunningly gorgeous landscape that surrounds them. Without any attention to the words the characters are saying, or by choosing to often not give them dialogue at all, we never learn about one single character. We don't know any real motivations and never learn anything about, well, anyone.
The multiple time jumps feel tiresome and almost seem to be letting you know that the characters actually don't matter nearly as much as the pretty world. Instead of a film, it feels like an opaque poem, one that purposely wants to keep you at a distance. Bateman as a director does little to shape the performances as well, with a lot of awkard line readings and stilted performances (I would also suggest a much better movement coach, as the fight sequences are awkward at best). I suspect that The Wanting Mare doesn't have nearly as much to say as it thinks it does, but I can't even be sure of that, since the film is so insistent of not saying anything out loud. The characters on screen may understand the world, but if they do, they literally never tell us, or show us anything. Visually, it's beautifully imagined but as a film it's frustratingly hollow. That's what you walk away with, which certainly isn't the goal.
GRADE: D
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY Nicholas Ashe Bateman STARRING Jordan Monaghan, Josh Clark, Edmond Cofie, Christine Kellogg-Darrin, Nicholas Ashe Bateman, Maxine Muster, Ashleigh Nutt NOW AVAILABLE ON VOD AND SELECT THEATRES