The Rose of Nevada

The Rose of Nevada (Mark Jensen, 2026) is an indie film made with next-to-no budget that has garnered some good reviews.  Jensen is a filmmaker in U.K. and has made one previous movie that is also well-reviewed, a horror film called Enys Men.  The Rose of Nevada is essentially a silent movie; the film is comprised of shots that are often discordant (if striking) and don't require a synchronized soundtrack to make sense.  This means that there are no extended dialogue scenes -- people speak in short declaratory sentences or grunt at one another.  The soundtrack which is all recorded up close -- that is, no one is ever remote from the camera (and microphone) -- is post-synchronized in a rudimentary way and obviously dubbed.  This gives the film the odd ambience of a badly dubbed Italian picture from the sixties.  The movie was shot with a Bolex 16 mm camera which means that the frame is boxy and the images are grainy, often marred with streaks and fountains of debris on the film-stock.  Many shots seem to be either tail or front leader and bleed into red and yellow.   The camera can't move and, so, the movie is built from close up still-life images:  we see bleeding fish in ice, a bunch of scary ratchets and winches, rust patterns on The Rose of Nevada which is fishing boat, battered shingles, garbage in the rain, rust and corrosion patterns on pieces of iron shot from so close a vantage that the images are abstract.  There are several POV shots, but the camerawork, although effective in a discursive way, is primitive.  The movie's style of editing, the voices sounding remotely and muffled on the soundtrack, and the repetitive images of rust and rot all make the movie ultimately very tedious.  There's no acting to speak of, since the players are deprived of their natural voices and the sound emerges from some kind of deadened casket.  The movie's plot is also extremely repetitive.  The blemishes in the film's production, which some critics find powerful and rife with meaning, don't really contribute anything to the picture's pedestrian plot and, in fact, make watching the movie something of a trial.

A fishing boat, the Rose of Nevada, vanished 30 years before the movie begins.  Now, the empty boat, a tiny red tugboat sort of vessel, bobs on the water next to a monumental wall, a quay that seems constructed like an Inca fortress from huge blocks of rusticated granite.  The owner of the boat wants to put the vessel back out at sea so as to earn profits from fishing.  Three hands are recruited:  a sullen kid named Nick (or Luke) who is impoverished and lives with wife and child in an apartment with a rain-sodden rotting roof, another young man, possibly named Liam (he's just a single barfly) and an old sea dog cap'n named Murgie.  An elderly woman who appears to be demented, or may be some sort of scary sibyl, warns the townsfolk that no good will come from setting out to sea on The Rose of Nevada -- the last time the ship was on the ocean, it vanished for thirty years and with all its crew, including the ghostly old woman's son.  (She's a version of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner.)  The ship goes out to sea for a couple days and catches a great haul of fish.  But the damned Rose of Nevada is some sort of maritime time-machine.  When the boat next docks, it is 1993, more than 30 years before it set sail.  Needless to say Nick/Luke, who misses his wife and daughter, is distraught.  He goes to the place where they lived, breaks into it, and sneaking around exits the apartment through a window, badly damaging the roof (which is sketchy) and, of course, resulting in the leak in his house that tormented him earlier in the film.  Nick/Luke just wants to get back to 2025 but there's no way to accomplish this.  The other young man, Liam, discovers that he has a wife and child waiting for him on the docks.  He acclimates himself to the situation quickly and moves in with the young woman and his child.  About every two days, The Rose of Nevada sets forth on the briny deep to catch fish.  At one point, the fishing vessel is caught in a squall and almost capsizes - the net gets wrecked when it gets tangled around the prop of the boat.  Murgie, the cap'n, has said that the community relies on the fishing vessel -- for every one of us, Murgie says, there are five men ashore who are counting on us.  When the boat comes back to the harbor, everyone from the community, accordingly, helps to mend the torn nets and fix the boat.  And, so, it goes out to sea again.  In the end, Nick/Luke has a dream or hallucination about bidding farewell to his wife and child.  His wife says "There is no time..." apropos of Nick/Luke hurrying back to the boat, but the gnomic statement stands for the meaning of the movie.  

The film seems like an ineptly made episode of The Twilight Zone, a half-hour episode expanded to almost two hours.  The narrative is confusing and I have no idea what parts of the film are supposed to mean:  for instance, there's a motif of roses brought to a cliff over the rocky beach with the implication that someone is going to commit suicide by hurling themselves over the precipice;  Nick/Luke goes up to the cliff where he sheds some tears and broods over the problems of being, as Vonnegut says "unstuck in time."  But Nick/Luke doesn't kill himself and, later, even makes his own separate peace with the situation.  We last see him enjoying breakfast  with mom and dad -- I think it's his mother who becomes the scary wraith-like sibyl in the opening scenes in the movie.  The dialogue is risible:  it's all of the Popeye the Sailor species of discourse -- lots of "Arghs!" and growled imprecations in an incomprehensible dialect.  The movie is a hollow puzzle film that is much too long and confusing to be interesting.  There are excellent scenes involving the mechanics of fishing, an enterprise which seems to involve extremely hard labor.  But those parts of the movie consist of about 5 minutes -- except that the movie just keeps repeating over and over its "toilers of the sea" footage.