Mare's Nest

This is a film that has the energy of a first feature, and not only because it stages a world without adults, with a science-fiction flair and the predilection for primordiality, but rather due to the freshness of its gaze, through a camera that neither depicts nor represents, but explore and ventures.

For its assumed anarchy – Ben Rivers being one of its most refined apologists today – and the foundational function to which a society of only-children seems to be destined, I cannot but recall a real first feature, Werner Herzog’s Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen (Even Dwarfs Started Small, 1970). While the German movie focuses on the group dynamics and develops into anthropological pessimism, Mare’s Nest is animated by a form of anthropological optimism, a non-anthropocentric optimism let’s say, insofar as the children seem to be able to both enchant and be enchanted by a world whose landscapes get an oneiric (and oneirically idyllic) atmosphere.

A second, relevant difference from Herzog’s story is that Rivers’ movie doesn’t properly tell a story and, more fundamentally, does not want to say anything specific. Important topics such as the environmental collapse and the existential need for alternative living will emerge, but without being thematised. The film says without showing that it wants to say, it does not instrumentalise its figures but let them express freely – or at least we have the impression of not knowing where the film is headed.

For this impression, a decisive role is played by the main character, the young Moon – an extraordinarily convincing Moon Guo Barker – whose curiosity and interest in learning give us the key to enter and experience the film. Her silences are part of a porous world where the different languages spoken by the other children are not an obstacle, for they appear to be always connected, and connected also with the language of nature. Is it pure coincidence that Moon’s real father is the philosopher Stephan Barker? A notorious advocate of “global expressivism”, a theory that defends the idea that language functions only through agency, without the need for meanings that are related to representations of the world? In fact, in a conceptual episode of the film staging Don DeLillo’s one-act play The Word for Snow, words are discussed as relicts without meaning, as they reflect the disappearing of things on a collapsing planet and the powerlessness of old wisdom.

Now, Moon and the film seem to react against any defeatism through the visionary force of the myth. While the old myth of the Minotaur is framed in an old-fashioned film – a film in a film, a captive film if you will – the successive images of the children out of a gigantic cave hints at the Platonic myth and therefore a visionary world. The visionary character is underlined through the impressive painterly quality of the scene, that makes this scene one that will remain engraved in our memory – this way not only referring to a myth but creating a new one… Expressivity, beyond the wanting-to-say, beyond the constraints of meanings, is the language of the film – something the feeling of the last scene where Moon drives a car in the desert clearly conveys.

More than the words, the tools of this expressive language are simple deeds and communication between all kind of beings, whether animate or inanimate. In order to experience this porosity of said beings, which has a therapeutical function against the existential anxieties for our collapsing planet, Ben Rivers not only chooses to let his camera (together with Carmen Pellon) indulge itself equally with humans, animals or stones but, thanks to Philippe Ciompi’s extraordinary work on the sound, also builds a plural and boilingly sensual environment, one which constitutes the matter of this visionary expressivity.

Both post-apocalyptic and neo-primitivist, Mare’s Nest operates a powerful reset-restart, projecting us into the cosmic breath of a society that has children’s eyes. This is not a coming-of-age movie, because the children are figures of a utopic world where people approach their environment with fresh curiosity and the privilege of meaninglessness. This is rather a coming-of-epoch movie, where we can rebuild a sensitive connection to our more-than-human companions. Mare’s Nest will be able to express this vision, as we won’t see this last film by Ben Rivers as an imaginative journey but we will experience it as real and well-anchored in the present time. This is an imperative movie for the new Millennium.