Rose of Nevada
The waves rise, the waves fall; the tide comes in, the tide goes out; the sea gives, and the sea takes, offering fish to the men brave enough to face the open water and unpredictable storms on the deck of the small fishing boats, lifted to the dock of the small Cornish town which it calls home and sold on locally, but sometimes taking from that community which clings stubbornly to the rocks even as it dies within.
Married with a young child, in need of employment even before the old hole in the ceiling began to leak in the rain, Nick Dyer has signed on to work a fishing vessel alongside deckhand Liam, new to the area and with no attachments, the moon broken into a hundred sparkling diamonds as they haul the nets in, returning to shore to find a place familiar but changed, a thriving town rather than the familiar peeling paint and rust, strangers calling them by different names.
The vessel in question the Rose of Nevada, aboard are The Beast’s George MacKay as Nick and Fantastic Beasts’ Callum Turner as Liam, greeted as the former sailors of that fishing boat, their story known to Nick though it happened before he was born, one of whom died when the ship went out short-handed and never returned, the other who then killed himself out of guilt over letting his friend drown, throwing himself from the cliff, the men finding themselves living the events of a generation past.
Written and directed by Enys Men’s Mark Jenkin, like that film Rose of Nevada is abstract, an experience as much as a film, untethered and lost in thick fog, tangled in torn nets and pulled by undercurrents, Nick bereft at what he has lost while Liam finds advantage in the past, one losing a family and the other gaining one by default, while the skipper (The Damned’s Francis Magee) evades answers as skillfully as sandbanks.
A film of repeating patterns, of cycles of sea while the rituals of the land remain fixed, the elderly grieving mother next door to the house where Nick has never lived (Enys Men’s Mary Woodvine) sees through the fog of her fading memories that something has changed, her mind slipping between past and present but fixed in neither, but while what is happening may be understood, at least in some vague sense, it is neither spoken of nor explained, and certainly not to outsiders.
Rose of Nevada berthed in a harbour safe but wrong, like Sapphire and Steel deconstructing The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Nick a man who has fallen through a hole and struggles to get back, to repair it and return to where he belongs, is he the fish that has been caught in the net and thrown back, displaced and disoriented, Jonah escaping the whale or a piece of flotsam tossed on the waves, clinging on hoping the breaking dawn light will show the way home?
Rose of Nevada will be on general release from Friday 24th April
