Imagine a wigged and beautified Englishman lying in a lavender field, who gets up and reads a reflection on the indifference that follows the lack of pleasure, gets nervous because he doesn't find the Alps ("Where are the Alps? I have to find them, these mountains of terror that can lead me to the sublime"), then calms down by drinking some tea that a servant prepares for him ("The English must have a good cup of tea"), with which he soon resumes his journey through the woods. Imagine that, after complaining about too many trees, while urinating against a trunk, the Englishman gets nervous at the sight of some ants walking on his foot and rails ("This is the problem with nature: it is so insistent"). We are in Provence during an unspecified summer of the eighteenth century. We are at the beginning of The Trouble with Nature.The film, presented in the Bright Future competition of the 49th edition of the Rotterdam Film Festival, tells a fictional episode in the life of the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, who in 1757, at the age of nineteen, published the treatise "A philosophical investigation into the origin of our ideas of Sublime and Beautiful", with which, in full enlightenment, he laid the foundations of the future romantic aesthetic, mother of all subsequent aesthetics. Director Illum Jacobi imagines that, many years after the publication of the book that gave him fame, a Burke now in financial distress decides to go to the French Alps to experience that Sublime then deductively described only starting from Aristotelian thought, in order to rewrite his treatise giving it new life and new fame. On the one hand the frivolity of the man who demands tea and make-up even in conditions of greatest deprivation, the arrogance of the master towards the indigenous servant Awak (played by a resplendent Nathalia Acevedo) given to him by his brother, and the neurosis of the intellectual, masterfully expressed by the muttering interpretation of Antony Langdon (former Spacehog guitarist), they are made the subject of a ridicule that slides throughout the film, up to the amazing shot with which Jacobi reproduces Caspar David Friedrich's Wanderer over the Sea of Fog, a romantic painting par excellence, with a Burkefrom behind again urinating on the Alpine ravines.
4 Reviews
Stunning cinematic speculation on the sublime, gender and nature.
fred-56331 July 2021
What a mischievous, funny and eloquent film! I watched The Trouble with Nature on the big screen at a festival screening and could not help being drawn into this strange minimalistic alpine fantasy. It follows philosopher Edmund Burke (played by Antony Langdon), who wrote a book on the sublime back in the 18th century, during a deep midlife crisis that has send him on a trip to the alps to restore his reputation by writing a new edition in the field. Without further notice the film opens in a lavender field where Burke is sleeping, already lost in nature and his own project. Where will I find the sublime ? Good question and one that becomes the subject of the film. I was afraid that this would lead into pathetic terretory, but surprisingly the film stays true to the question and not the answer. We later learn that Burke has lost all his money investing in his brothers plantation in the west indies and now finds himself traveling with a servant send to him by the brother to even things out. Her name is Awak (superbly played by Nathalia Acevedo) and she slowly becomes the central character of the film. Burke who has never been outside London soon discovers that he does not like nature at all. It is messy and will not provide him with a simple answer to his question. The sheer volume of it disturbs him, trees everywhere, ants and endless hills in his least favourite color; green. Meanwhile Awak makes easy connections with everything around her, she drinks straight from the streams, collects mushrooms and interacts with wild animals. In one stunning scene she has close contact with a wild Chamois, in another she has an erotic encounter with moss. This all disturbs Burke who grows jealous of her unspoken alliance with the very subject he cannot connect with. Burke speaks non stop to himself and all around him in long rants that made me laugh several times. In one scene they stumble upon ruins of a farm and Burke accuses nature of a massacre on this poor attempt at civilisation. The film slowly gains height both physically and philosophically as the subject of man and woman's relationship to nature becomes more central. It is difficult not to see the film as a feminist statement, not just because of the silent poetic portrait of Awak as the full human potential for connection, but because Burke represents such a stubborn male view of nature that still dominates the world today. In that sense the film is a comment on our times and I can highly recommend it for it's witty dialogue, odd story and stunning cinematography that shows the sublime without pointing at it.
More ridiculous than sublime, unfortunately
HuddsOn12 November 2020
I was drawn to this film by the fab scenery in the trailer and the intriguing subject matter. The Irish-born statesman, philosopher, and man of letters, Edmund Burke, has been described as one of the most important formative influences on English conservatism, although he took stances that might have been viewed as liberal back in the mid-18th Century. He attempted to find a peaceful resolution to the dispute between the Crown and the American colonies, pursued the impeachment of the former Governor-General of Bengal over alleged plunder and corruption, and even opposed the slave trade.
The film deals only one aspect of Burke's life and legacy - his contribution to the philosophy of aesthetics, in particular the notion of "the sublime" - that in nature which inspires awe, reverence, or a sense of wonder mixed with terror. It takes place during a (probably fictitious) research trip to the French Alps in which Burke, played by Antony Langdon, sets out to further investigate his idea of "the sublime" for a revised edition of his treatise on the subject. Improbably, he undertakes his quest with a single companion - a female servant named Awak (Nathalia Acevedo), who acts as his cook, valet and baggage-hauler on the perilous journey.
There is both dramatic and comic potential in this scenario - Burke is portrayed as fastidious, foppish, and with an overbearing sense of entitlement, brusque in his dealings with members of the lower classes, and unprepared for the harsh conditions and biological hazards he encounters on his trek. But it's a wasted opportunity. The dialogue is lame and banal, with no attempt to give it a convincing 18th century flavour. (I don't claim that speech in period dramas has to be authentic in order to work - indeed there is something to be said, on occasions, for using an ultra-modern lexicon for greater impact and immediacy - but here, the use of modern colloquialisms just comes across as lazy.) There is no back-story concerning Burke's prior career and life in London, or how his theories connect to the wider intellectual and artistic scene in existence at that time. What's more, there is no meaningful development of the protagonist. His character does not really progress or change, through interaction either with his environment or his fellow human beings. Whether he's moaning about his tea being cold, straightening his periwig, demanding his face-powder, or crawling under a glacier, he remains the same fey, self-important, upper-class twit. Even as he is driven to seek more extreme landscapes in search of the "sublime", risking hypothermia in the process, there is no real sense of peril, and Burke doesn't seem to acquire any new humility, compassion or wisdom as a result of his brushes with hardship and death on his ill-defined spiritual quest.
Such a mocking and trivialising treatment of this Hiberno-British intellectual giant might be excusable if the film was at least funny. And yet it fails on the level of comedy too. Burke's snobbishness and peevishness are too understated, and Langdon's delivery and acting style too restrained, for it to work in this way. As for Awak, I'm at a loss to understand why the writer / director couldn't have made the interplay between the two characters more exciting. She's neither a muse, nor a companion, nor an intellectual rival, nor a lover, she's just . . . well, there. Her lines are delivered utterly without conviction (not her fault because it's a rotten script). And she's miscast - it's not credible that someone would employ such a slender, willowy young lady to drag the contents of a gentleman's wardrobe and other paraphernalia up and down mountains - she wouldn't survive two days.
I can't fault the visual elements; the director of photography exploits the splendid Alpine locations to the full. So, it works on the level of a travelogue. But the lazy writing and superficial approach to characterisation failed to sustain my interest in the human aspect of this drama, and any viewers who are hoping to be enlightened about the real Burke and his intellectual life will be sorely disappointed.
The film deals only one aspect of Burke's life and legacy - his contribution to the philosophy of aesthetics, in particular the notion of "the sublime" - that in nature which inspires awe, reverence, or a sense of wonder mixed with terror. It takes place during a (probably fictitious) research trip to the French Alps in which Burke, played by Antony Langdon, sets out to further investigate his idea of "the sublime" for a revised edition of his treatise on the subject. Improbably, he undertakes his quest with a single companion - a female servant named Awak (Nathalia Acevedo), who acts as his cook, valet and baggage-hauler on the perilous journey.
There is both dramatic and comic potential in this scenario - Burke is portrayed as fastidious, foppish, and with an overbearing sense of entitlement, brusque in his dealings with members of the lower classes, and unprepared for the harsh conditions and biological hazards he encounters on his trek. But it's a wasted opportunity. The dialogue is lame and banal, with no attempt to give it a convincing 18th century flavour. (I don't claim that speech in period dramas has to be authentic in order to work - indeed there is something to be said, on occasions, for using an ultra-modern lexicon for greater impact and immediacy - but here, the use of modern colloquialisms just comes across as lazy.) There is no back-story concerning Burke's prior career and life in London, or how his theories connect to the wider intellectual and artistic scene in existence at that time. What's more, there is no meaningful development of the protagonist. His character does not really progress or change, through interaction either with his environment or his fellow human beings. Whether he's moaning about his tea being cold, straightening his periwig, demanding his face-powder, or crawling under a glacier, he remains the same fey, self-important, upper-class twit. Even as he is driven to seek more extreme landscapes in search of the "sublime", risking hypothermia in the process, there is no real sense of peril, and Burke doesn't seem to acquire any new humility, compassion or wisdom as a result of his brushes with hardship and death on his ill-defined spiritual quest.
Such a mocking and trivialising treatment of this Hiberno-British intellectual giant might be excusable if the film was at least funny. And yet it fails on the level of comedy too. Burke's snobbishness and peevishness are too understated, and Langdon's delivery and acting style too restrained, for it to work in this way. As for Awak, I'm at a loss to understand why the writer / director couldn't have made the interplay between the two characters more exciting. She's neither a muse, nor a companion, nor an intellectual rival, nor a lover, she's just . . . well, there. Her lines are delivered utterly without conviction (not her fault because it's a rotten script). And she's miscast - it's not credible that someone would employ such a slender, willowy young lady to drag the contents of a gentleman's wardrobe and other paraphernalia up and down mountains - she wouldn't survive two days.
I can't fault the visual elements; the director of photography exploits the splendid Alpine locations to the full. So, it works on the level of a travelogue. But the lazy writing and superficial approach to characterisation failed to sustain my interest in the human aspect of this drama, and any viewers who are hoping to be enlightened about the real Burke and his intellectual life will be sorely disappointed.
Staying with the Trouble and the film
s-34922-8881626 October 2022
The film shows the physical and philosophical wandering of Edmund Burke, author of one of the pivotal works of romantic sentiment, A philosophical investigation into the origin of our ideas of Sublime and Beautiful. Burke (Antony Langdon) wants to confirm what he imagined sitting at his desk twelve years earlier. Strangled by financial problems in 1769 he decided to avert bankruptcy by updating his youthful masterpiece so as to revive its success. He leaves London for the Alps escorted by the servant Awak (Nathalia Acevedo), an indigenous woman from the West Indies.
Burke looks for the sublime among the flounces wrapped in a crimson frilly suit, complete with moccasins and foulards. In contact with wild nature for the first time, predictably, he finds it detestable. Burke is one of those who grill chops and play beach tennis on the shores of Alpine lakes. Weepy and inept, he stumbles at every step, never shuts up, gets entangled, gets dirty. He addresses the environment in which he moves as useless, sad, revolting, despicable. "I've never really liked the green," he says contemplating the Alpine sea, and it's almost an epiphany. On the other hand, however: not identifying the error as confirming a vanity extraneous to shame and penance. The title of Illum Jacobi's work could be embedded in Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). The prefix khthon in Greek refers to the underworld, chthonic, as opposed to Gaea, the vital surface now known as the biosphere. Chthulucene is therefore the era of underground connections, of a man who is no longer a protagonist, summit and sovereign but part of a network of living beings, a member of a community.
Jacobi places before our eyes a good part of the dualisms sprouted from Cartesian thought and collected in a list by Val Plumwood in 1993 in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature: Burke is a white, European, cultured and civilized male - too much too. When he is not engaged in clumsy attempts to free himself from the hindrances he sings about himself, reason, man's invincible will. It fills the "deafening" silence with a compulsive naming, with an exhausting stream of consciousness. Awak is his nemesis: female and Amerindian, therefore primitive, she is calm, silent and contemplative. Once abandoned the monstrous baggage of the master (almost the metaphor of his unsustainable ego) she moves gracefully dressed only in a white veil unable to hide its shapes. Whether Burke's pathetism arouses annoyance or at most some smiles, Awak bewitches, exudes charisma, remains a mystery.
The shots and backgrounds enhance the radical diversity of the relationship between the two with the earth. Burke is filmed from above, lost in a hell cluttered with withered trunks and annoying insects or surrounded by boulders and climbs on which he tries uncomfortable seats. We follow Awak looking into her eyes, we see her participate in a flourishing Eden in which she plunges half-naked, in peace. She reads the landscape, observes plants and animals in silence. In a moment of definitive symbiosis (eco-sexual, in fact), she accompanies one hand between her legs while with the other she caresses the mosses. By contrast, Burke filters the landscape with his nose stuffed into a book - his own - waking filthy, hooded, with bare testicles and a crooked wig. At the rise of jealousy for Awak and her empathy with the earth, he can only reaffirm the hierarchies of power: "I am the master and you serve me".
Burke looks for the sublime among the flounces wrapped in a crimson frilly suit, complete with moccasins and foulards. In contact with wild nature for the first time, predictably, he finds it detestable. Burke is one of those who grill chops and play beach tennis on the shores of Alpine lakes. Weepy and inept, he stumbles at every step, never shuts up, gets entangled, gets dirty. He addresses the environment in which he moves as useless, sad, revolting, despicable. "I've never really liked the green," he says contemplating the Alpine sea, and it's almost an epiphany. On the other hand, however: not identifying the error as confirming a vanity extraneous to shame and penance. The title of Illum Jacobi's work could be embedded in Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). The prefix khthon in Greek refers to the underworld, chthonic, as opposed to Gaea, the vital surface now known as the biosphere. Chthulucene is therefore the era of underground connections, of a man who is no longer a protagonist, summit and sovereign but part of a network of living beings, a member of a community.
Jacobi places before our eyes a good part of the dualisms sprouted from Cartesian thought and collected in a list by Val Plumwood in 1993 in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature: Burke is a white, European, cultured and civilized male - too much too. When he is not engaged in clumsy attempts to free himself from the hindrances he sings about himself, reason, man's invincible will. It fills the "deafening" silence with a compulsive naming, with an exhausting stream of consciousness. Awak is his nemesis: female and Amerindian, therefore primitive, she is calm, silent and contemplative. Once abandoned the monstrous baggage of the master (almost the metaphor of his unsustainable ego) she moves gracefully dressed only in a white veil unable to hide its shapes. Whether Burke's pathetism arouses annoyance or at most some smiles, Awak bewitches, exudes charisma, remains a mystery.
The shots and backgrounds enhance the radical diversity of the relationship between the two with the earth. Burke is filmed from above, lost in a hell cluttered with withered trunks and annoying insects or surrounded by boulders and climbs on which he tries uncomfortable seats. We follow Awak looking into her eyes, we see her participate in a flourishing Eden in which she plunges half-naked, in peace. She reads the landscape, observes plants and animals in silence. In a moment of definitive symbiosis (eco-sexual, in fact), she accompanies one hand between her legs while with the other she caresses the mosses. By contrast, Burke filters the landscape with his nose stuffed into a book - his own - waking filthy, hooded, with bare testicles and a crooked wig. At the rise of jealousy for Awak and her empathy with the earth, he can only reaffirm the hierarchies of power: "I am the master and you serve me".
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