Mona Fastvold creates a bold and intoxicating meta-musical that chronicles the eventful life and times of Ann Lee, one of the founders of religious sect the Shakers.
In the 1960s, the American psychotherapist Arthur Janov developed a curative method that he referred to as primal scream therapy (PST). It does pretty much what it says on the tin, inviting the participant to allay the pressures of suppressed anxiety by simply allowing their body to erupt in the most abrasive and antisocial way possible. It’s by no means a medically certified practice, yet the pangs of exhilaration that can be delivered from allowing oneself to slip into such an unnatural state do offer many a mental map through the darkness. Where PST has been more successful, however, is as a timeworn cliché of narrative cinema, with the large majority of dramatic films containing at least one emotive scene of a character offloading their trauma by bellowing into the void.
Mona Fastvold’s The Testament of Ann Lee is a film that, through form and content, explores the notion of ecstatic release, but for almost its entire runtime. It tells the little-known story of the 18th-century Christian sect known as the Shakers, via the eventful life of one of its founding members, “Mother” Ann Lee (Amanda Seyfried). Prayer for the Shakers is an external rather than internal undertaking, as they reject the bowed interiority of traditional worship in favour of chanting and physical contortions that resemble something closer to a Pina Bausch dance recital. While it is possible to engage in this form of worship alone, the Shakers tend to prefer collective prayer, so their commune with God has the appearance of a grand performance where bodies are bound in holy rhythm. To add: I use the present tense here as, per the film’s closing credits, there are still two Shakers active (down from a peak of 6,000 in Lee’s time) in a community that has since gained heritage status in the US.
Fastvold does not hold these visceral, soul-cleansing moments back as plot-augmenting set pieces or tone-shifting digressions – they rumble incessantly throughout the film, inviting the audience to experience the euphoric drone of Shaker worship in near-real time. Even though the story is anchored in enough traditional nods to biography to supply a wider context to Ann, her mission and her manifold persecutions, the film itself has its own therapeutic qualities, and one could imagine it becoming a destination for underground viewing parties at which patrons sit as close to the screen as possible having ingested mind-altering narcotics for further enhancement. Think of the famed Star Gate sequence from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, but instead of consciousness-warping interstellar travel, it’s Old English disciples of the cloth donning grubby muslin and jerking along to druidic chants. Seeing this film projected on evanescent 70mm film only adds to the heady effect.
The film charts Ann’s life from her childhood as a mill worker in Manchester until her death at the age of 48 in the New England Shaker commune she helped build by hand. Early in life she develops the cryptic credo of, “A place for everything and everything in its place,” suggesting that human suffering is penance we should all be thankful for, as it’s all part of God’s rich pageant. And yet Ann is presented as someone who is constantly displeased with her lot in life, rejecting the moribund and bigoted status quo of the Georgian era and always searching for new and different places to be. Even at a young age she was an iconoclast, finding fault in the doctrines of the established Catholic church and chiding her parents for the sin of fornication (for which she receives lashes on the hand, a moment that is framed as a potential origin point for her eventual spiritual path).
The story is delivered through the awed narration of Sister Mary Partington (Thomasin McKenzie), which allows us to enjoy the occasional juicy episode that was the product of hearsay or gossip. Yet Fastvold is admirably measured in the way she presents Lee as a figure of historical curiosity who we can never really get too close to. It’s hard to think of a more perfect performer than Seyfried for this role, her huge eyes emphasising both her ability to draw people towards her cause and her uncanny ability to power through the torments and sorrows piled onto her and her faithful followers. We learn that, in her formative years she lost four children before they reached the age of one, and the entire film can be read as Ann’s own methodology for processing a series of traumas that would have led many to give up the ghost.
Fastvold sees Ann as a pioneer of gender equality, yet her film doesn’t come close to hagiography. There is no hackneyed list of intertitles that underscore her achievements at the end of the film, rather the purpose of The Testament of Ann Lee transcends an attempt to salvage Ann’s celebrity after the fact. The film is critical and quizzical when it comes to the many contradictions of Ann’s creed, particularly in her focus on human joy and empathy and reaping the natural bounty of the earth while also rejecting sex and procreation, making the Shakers something of their own Doomsday cult. Upon their arrival in New York following a punishing Atlantic crossing, Ann immediately spits venom at the organisers of a slave auction on a street corner, yet is comfortable in exercising her own form of cultural imperialism by bringing her gospel to America. It’s a film that deals with its subject with a level of historical precision and distance that’s rarely seen in cinema, while also using this distance to add its own subtle layer of expression and commentary.
To touch on the film’s immaculate craft, shout-outs are definitely due to the cinematographer William Rexer, whose exquisite images help to elevate the film above the aesthetic banality of the typical historical biopic, while Sam Bader’s careful production design leans into the Shaker’s tastefully spartan worldview. However, top marks go to the composer Daniel Blumberg, whose richly cacophonous achievement here is head-spinning to say the least. He creates lightly modernised variations of Shaker spirituals that have been woven into the fabric of the film’s plot, and it’s admirable how strict he is with the uniform tone and dynamics of the music, never reaching out for undue moments of melody or throwing in emotive crescendos for effect. He won an Academy Award for his work on Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (which was co-written by Fastvold, and Corbet returns the favour here), and one hopes that he’ll be be duly rewarded for a work that’s even more radical and impressive.
Yet it’s Fastvold who somehow makes all these elements coalesce with such brio and eccentricity, expanding the possibilities of filmed biography while also making a film that manages to land direct hits to the head, the heart and the gut. Unlike Ann, this is not a film that preaches to its flock, and it’s one that has led to a number of post-viewing conversations with colleagues about its aim and its purpose. On first watch, the film it reminded me of the most was Lars von Trier’s cursed digi musical, Dancer in the Dark (2000), in the way it juxtaposes the pain of human suffering with the levity of music and dance. Yet on further contemplation, I’m reminded of the cinema of the great Agnès Varda, whose avowedly feminist outlook was always subject to doubt, curiosity and the sublime mysteries of existence.
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