Arcadia, review: BBC Four's mysterious audio-visual collage of the British countryside was intoxicating
The BFI has made a habit in recent years of opening up its archives for ambitious filmmakers to recut and score with the help of indie music royalty. Penny Woolcock deployed British Sea Power’s roiling soundscapes in From the Sea to the Land Beyond, King Creosote brought aching whimsy to Virginia Heath’s From Scotland with Love and surely only Mogwai could have soundtracked Mark Cousins’s remarkable Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise.
Paul Wright’s Arcadia (BBC Four) was a fascinating, provocative addition to the cannon, scored by Goldfrapp’s Will Gregory and Portishead’s Adrian Utley and ruminating on our relationship to the countryside. The truth, we were told, was in the soil, and so this mysterious, elliptical audio-visual collage started and finished withseeds sprouting and flowers erupting from the earth.
Framing the British countryside as a land of both sinister savagery and bucolic idyll is not new, but Wright’s rhapsodic montages nurtured rural traditions while picking away at them. His selections ranged from short films to Pathé newsreel to local news reports and covered a remarkable amount of ground. From the Hovis-land with its milkmen and apple-scrumping scamps, we took in hippies, graveyards, murmurations of starlings (jaw-dropping, these), solvent abuse, cheese-rolling, punks, foxhunting and ravers through to the creeping impact of mechanisation and industrialisation. A vague sense of unease persisted due to Wright’s fascination with paganism and the unsettling, surprising blend of original compositions and traditional songs on the soundtrack.
For what it was worth, either side of the Brexit debate could probably have found fuel for their arguments here, especially during a frantic sequence lamenting the march of “progress”. But for Wright, timelessness felt more important. At once a celebration and elegy, warning and fairy tale, this was a striking, troubling and above all intoxicating film.
