‘oYour ordeal is worth it!” This is the shout-out from one of Mona Fastvold’s film stalwarts, who co-wrote The Brutalist with her partner in film, Brady Corbet. A fierce, passionate, shocking and sometimes disconcerting drama about Ann Lee, a historical figure who endured religious persecution as the leader of the fundamentalist Shaker movement in 18th-century England.
As the embodiment of Christ’s second coming, Lee took her radical message to the New World and established a lasting community of souls in pre-revolutionary America, even as she was again persecuted by the new patriarchy for being a woman and a pacifist. Her Shakers were known above all for their skill in creating stylish, elegant and minimalist furniture. Although the connection with Christ’s profession is not emphasized. Lee is played by Amanda Seyfried, with Lewis Pullman as her brother William and Christopher Abbott as her oppressive husband Abraham, who appears to be partial to a bit of BDSM, being a Christian in the marital bed.
The film sometimes seems like Lars von Trier’s nightmare depicting ironic martyrdom. <마녀> At times it looks like a horror film by the same Robert Eggers, and at times it looks like a strange but majestic Broadway musical melodrama in which the shaking and trembling of dancing believers in ecstatic submission to the joy of God is embodied in choreography not unlike a musical stomp. The atheists and rationalists in the audience might want to ask: hmm… is What exactly is Anne Lee’s will? What is her message, and what is her legacy for the 21st century?
The answer is simply this: She founded a Christian sect. (Some statistics on follower count are provided in the closing credits.) Lee fiercely believed that all sex was wrong and an evil interference with the spiritual. No follower of this film is so disloyal as to ask how humanity can be saved from destruction. Is it simply a matter of allowing those outside the faith to continue their miserable activities for humanity and bring the resulting children into the fold? And the shaking, shaking and speaking in tongues would certainly seem like mass hysteria and sexual repression to a modern audience. But the film can’t exactly endorse this obvious diagnosis. Because we want to take Lee seriously on some level.
But Fastvold is arguably justified in wanting to show that this sexual repression generated enough redirected energy to take religious groups from Manchester to colonial New York and make a real contribution to the debate about new enlightenment and freedom. Mr. Lee shouts, “I’m embarrassed!” At the slave auctions held in the new world of freedom for white people, she did not think of abolitionism as part of her Christian mission.
This is a truly strange film, difficult to grasp in both tone and meaning, a film that uses the obvious effects of irony and its rhetorical forms while simultaneously distancing itself from these effects and asking the audience to sympathize with and even respect Lee because he should not be a villain. Fastvold is probably asking audiences to take whatever elements they like from the film. It is a mysterious ritual that is not for everyone.