In my Venice Film Festival review of Mona Fastvold‘s The Testament of Ann Lee, I noted that Shaker founder Ann Lee, who lived until age 48, “was flat-faced and rather ugly, and Seyfried (who turned 40 in December) is, of course, beautiful, so the film’s realism is lacking in this regard.
“And as long as hotness is on the table, 35-year-old Stacy Martin, who plays Jane Wardley, a British born co-founder of the Shakers, is way too attractive to play a woman who’s into a no-sex, God-and-only-God lifestyle…one look at Martin and you’re thinking “what is she doing with this bunch?”
Kristi Coulter has tried to ridicule me for sharing this observation, but hot women rarely renounce the perks that are naturally and plentifully given to them. Guys too. The truth is that abundantly dishy persons never join secular oddball religious cults because…like, why? The world is at their feet so why turn inward?
John Huston got away with casting the prim and prudish Deborah Kerr as a nun in Heaven Knows, Mr, Allison (’57), but would any sensible director have cast Marilyn Monroe in a similar role? Attractiveness is as attractiveness does.
I’ve always had trouble believing the central premise of Alfred Hitchcock‘s I Confess, which was that a young guy who looks like Montgomery Clift would become a humble, soft-spoken priest in Quebec. He’s simply too pretty for that.
The fetching Jean Simmons played a version of 1920s evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in Elmer Gantry (’60), but at the end of Act Two she began fucking Burt Lancaster. (Gantry was directed by Simmons’ husband, Richard Brooks.)
I’ve always respected Jeffrey Hunter‘s performance as the Nazarene in King of Kings (’61), but nobody accepted his being cast in the role. He was way too beautiful..those radiant blue eyes, that golden-brown hair, those perfectly pedicured toes.
HE’s review of Fastvold’s film, posted on 9.1.25:
“It’s certainly striking and, for what it’s worth, a wackazoid original,” I allowed.
“It’s a regimented, pageant-like, nutbag historical musical about Ann Lee, the eccentric Shakers founder who was into ecstatic God-praising and celibacy and fervent denial of sexuality.”
Lee was a devoted, shrewish-looking miserabalist who left northwest England, along with a couple of dozen followers, to re-settle in upstate New York (who’s ever even heard of Niskayuna?) and dedicate themselves to unmatched religious fanaticism.
How do you make a film about radical secularists who were into hymn-singing and general shrieking and, one presumes, pissing off the normies? Credit Fastvold, at least, for giving in to the crazy…for surrendering to Lee’s ecstatic mystical whateverisms, and really going for it willy-nilly.
While shooting near Budapest at the cost of a mere $10 million, Fastvold and her cast (Amanda Seyfried, Thomasin McKenzie, Lewis Pullman, Stacy Martin, Tim Blake Nelson, Christopher Abbott, Matthew Beard) and crew went mad with the Shaker spirit, and you have to respect that.
Congrats to composer Daniel Blumberg and choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall. The madness clearly engulfed them also, and they’ve created otherworldly asylum vibes.
The movie pulsates with extreme this and that — extreme behavior, extreme denial of life, extreme visual murkiness despite being shot in 70mm, the embrace of puritanical madness. All of the terrible spiritual suppressive stuff that has given old-time Christian religion such a bad name for centuries…all of this is abundant.
Plus I couldn’t understand a single word of it, and for whatever reason there were no English subtitles, which every Venice Film Festival entry has brandished so far.
I knew early on that The Testament of Ann Lee would almost certainly give me pain because Fastvold cowrote it with husband Brady Corbet, whose direction of The Brutalist made people like myself writhe in agony last year, and whom I regard as a kind of louche anti-Christ of modern cinema. I knew, in short, that the Corbet influence would be bad news, and boy, was it ever!
HE to industry friendo after last night’s press screening: “Fastvold’s Shaker film is mute nostril agony. A journo pally concurs — ‘Awful’. I noticed five to six walkouts, heard a couple of boos when it ended.”
Friendo to HE: “It sounds like this year’s Women Talking.”
HE to friendo: “It’s much, MUCH worse than Women Talking. Somebody has called it The Brutalist: Folie a Deux.”
Fastvold: “I thought Ann Lee deserved something grandiose and wonderful. How many stories have we seen about male icons on a grand scale, again and again and again? Can we not see one story about a woman like this?”
Seyfried on her Shaker singing: “A lot of it was animal sounds as opposed to melodic sounds.”
