There’s an eccentric Englishness in this quirky, microbudget feature from screenwriter Adam Ganz and director Marc Isaacs. They have created a kind of docu-fictional guided reality, a weird soap set in the picturesque Essex town of Thaxted, known for its association with the composer Gustav Holst who was entranced by its beauty and established a music festival there with the encouragement of its Christian socialist vicar, Conrad Noel.
Ganz and Isaacs have got some present-day Thaxted inhabitants to play heightened or fictionally modified versions of themselves, in a story interspersed with black-and-white clips from Ripe Earth, the Boulting brothers’ early short film from 1938, also set in Thaxted. Lori (Yingge Lori Yang) is a young Chinese film-maker who has come to Thaxted to record the local traditions, especially the morris dancing, but finds herself drawn into the world of Keith (Keith Martin), a fierce Arsenal fan, devastated by the recent loss of his wife, who looked after his financial affairs, but may not have been faithful to him. Conrad Noel’s ghostly voice speaks to Lori, explaining how socialism grows naturally from the teachings of Christ, and she is also visited by the ghost of Keith’s late wife who is tormented by her need to confess from beyond the grave.
As for Thaxted itself, it isn’t exactly the Shakespearean “demi-paradise” declaimed by Keith. There is what looks like a nasty altercation in the pub, occasioned by Lori’s presence, and Isaacs allows us to glimpse what looks like someone in minstrel blackface in an old photograph of a morris dancing scene. There are, however, no mentions of Brexit. An odd, but diverting modern pastoral scene, which refuses a parochial view of England.
• This Blessed Plot is released on 26 January in UK cinemas.
