Cinema has a deep distrust of the devout. Even though many movie types are tied up in all sorts of personal spiritual pursuits, organised religion often gets a rough ride in Hollywood and beyond. Lately, though, characters of faith have been getting better PR. In the recent Argentine film Belén, the protagonist – a battler against abortion injustice – nods repeatedly to God. Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery endorses the deep grace of a young priest as virtually its controlling idea, while even Avatar: Fire and Ash has its own woo-woo supreme being.
And now there’s The Testament of Ann Lee, the story of a Christian sect who – though batty – are not shown as malign hypocrites, and portrayed as victims rather than perpetrators of sex abuse. Ann Lee was a charismatic 18th century leader of the Shaker movement, who took it across the Atlantic to found communities in the eastern US. Mona Fastvold’s biopic is a remarkable extravaganza of music, movement and image – tactile, vivid and lucid, both visually and textually – plunging us head-first into the sect’s ecstatic practice.
We follow “Mother Ann” (Amanda Seyfried) across much of her 48 years. As a Manchester mill-worker, she’s drawn into a Methodist group dubbed the Shaking Quakers (to be elided into Shakers) at the home of a well-heeled couple, where an evening culminates in tribalistic song and dance – everyone from young men to middle-aged matrons giving themselves up to panting, yelling and writhing. It’s the first of many such sequences, with the songs taken from original Shaker spirituals and the dances somewhat made up, which turns the movie at times into an odd kind of primordial West End show – like Jane Austen put on as a musical by the makers of Stomp.
The sect is pro-equality and pro-women, so Ann Lee rises to become its chief – well – mover and shaker, half-asserting herself as the Second Coming of Christ. (She’s illiterate, so doesn’t draw much on Scripture.) The authorities raid their house-church and jail Lee from time to time. But her chief cross to bear is her husband, Abraham (Christopher Abbott), a blacksmith and Marquis de Sade devotee with whom she has four children, all of whom die in infancy. This is shown in a sequence of obstetric nightmares even more inventive and blistering than those of the recent Hamnet.
Her marriage turns Lee off sex for good, and she gets the Shakers to agree that “men and women must abstain from all lustful gratification of the flesh”, which encompasses married couples as well as Lee’s gay brother, William (Lewis Pullman), her most stalwart supporter. As you might expect, the new rule causes a fair bit of trouble down the line, especially when Lee and a core group fetch up in the New World in 1774 for the back half of the film.
A wanton England in the first hour gives way to a rigid, emergent America in the second. Up the Hudson River, Lee and her league of millenarians eventually find followers and build handsome accommodations, filled with the cottage-core furniture we surround ourselves with today. Yet they’re tagged as treasonous and satanic during the Revolutionary War, and atrocities lie in wait.
The Testament of Ann Lee is a beautiful and raw history film, just like Fastvold’s previous offering, the lesbian tragedy The World to Come (2020). As was the case there, a brisk narration carries us through flurries of events – delivered by one of Lee’s acolytes, Mary (Thomasin McKenzie). It creates the sense of a bustling, highly cinematic lantern lecture. Amanda Seyfried contributes much to the film’s sheen – guarded and brittle at times, fearless and effusive at others, as a woman who wanted everyone to live life to its limits in a state of celibacy. (For obvious reasons, only a handful of Shakers carry on the faith today.)
The beautifully couched script is by Fastvold and Brady Corbet, both of whom penned Corbet’s The Brutalist a year ago. Long, studied sequences – like a storm at sea or laborious colonising trips round New England – alternate with deliberate plot ellipses and sudden bursts of violence, all of which are Fastvold/Corbet trademarks. Bits of magical realism and Terence Malick-like inner-eye ecstasies pop up alongside conspicuously hand-painted cityscape backdrops. Cinematographer William Rexer, shooting on several film stocks, creates lambent candle-lit scenes and others with Vermeer-ish window light, while he doesn’t mind if the sun goes in and out during exterior takes.
Equally of note: the earthy production design (Sam Bader) and the complex soundscape keyed into Daniel Blumberg’s score, driven by melodious percussion and the Shakers’ endlessly chanted orisons. Then there’s the dancing en masse of the converted, devised by choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall – everyone swooping and jerking and scuffling, a little like the abrupt dances of Pina Bausch but without the intimacy. It looks both stressed and liberating, as hands slap inwards and push outwards in a mix of absorption and expulsion – attitudes that seem key to religion.
Obviously the filmmakers don’t endorse the Shakers’ odd credo, nor probably Christianity itself. Yet they stay sympathetic to Lee and her noisy, gentle people. Mother Ann’s struggles with God and sex will either fascinate you or get you crossly reaching for your Richard Dawkins. It’s not the normal way we see fundamentalists at the pictures. But Fastvold just wants to stay inquisitive without casting the first stone.
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