Made inside a New Jersey warehouse, where scenes were shot against blue screens on which digital landscapes were superimposed, Nicholas Ashe Bateman’s The Wanting Mare conjures a vivid, naturalistic sense of place out of ones and zeroes. The film is set in and around the fictional city of Whithren, which at times looks like Ingmar Bergman’s beloved Fårö in the Baltic Sea, at others a tumbledown Mediterranean hill village. The skies and seas appear infinite throughout, but in the end, they’re nothing but mirages.
The Wanting Mare finds a young woman, Moira (Jordan Monaghan), wandering through Whithren’s landscapes by day and rocking out to eight-track tapes at night in a mostly empty warehouse. The costuming feels modern but the technology outmoded—no one has a cellphone—suggesting a vaguely troubled time period in which electronics are hard to come by. One evening, she hears some shouting, and a few shots fired, and she meets in a stairwell the wounded Lawrence (Bateman), whom she takes home and nurses back to health.
The film frequently employs shaky handheld—a touch of vérité that contrasts with the setting, creating an intriguing friction. The narrative is fragmentary, offered more often in oneiric glimpses than scenes, and the dialogue is spare, which is good considering that Bateman’s words strain for the sort of lyricism that comes easier to his fabulous images. “Do you wonder what was before?” Moira asks Lawrence, unnaturally and affectedly, during their courtship. Otherwise, their budding romance is suggested in brief visions of laughing and dancing.
Jump cuts carry us across decades, moving between characters, discovering tragedies across generations. Lawrence surreally finds a baby and brings it to Moira, at which point a family, slowly, strangely, starts to form. The child grows up and makes mistakes similar to those her parents made—a trajectory of conjoined lives that’s bathed in purple hues from lights both natural and artificial, suggesting a permanent twilight, a suspended moment of transition that’s almost purgatorial. Flickers of light dance on the air, like motes of dust set on fire.
There’s a cargo ship that leaves the island once a year, with some room for passengers, but tickets are so hard to get that people kill for them. Moira wants to be on the boat, as does her adopted daughter (Yasamin Keshtkar). Almost everyone seems to want to be on it, in fact, as though Whithern were a dystopian prison—a provincial and isolated place, like many hometowns. It’s as if Bateman is commenting on a distinctly American suburban malaise, using a fictional place, digitally made, to get a real and painful truth about being stuck in a place you didn’t choose, amid circumstances you didn’t create. Plagued by a recurring dream that’s passed down her matrilineal line, a vision of the world just as it was, Moira is eager to shed her house, her history, her inheritance. She reports that the dream is burningly painful, surely because it’s a picture of something that’s not this—the awful, inescapable present.
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