‘Our ordeal is worth it!” This is the cry of one of the faithful in Mona Fastvold’s movie, co-written with her partner Brady Corbet, with whom she co-wrote The Brutalist. It is a vehement, fervent, striking but sometimes baffling drama about the historical figure of Ann Lee, who endured religious persecution in 18th-century England as leader of the fundamentalist Shaker movement.
As the embodiment of Christ’s second coming, Lee took her radical message to the New World and in pre-revolutionary America founded an enduring community of souls, persecuted all over again by the new patriarchy for being a woman and a pacifist. Her Shakers were known among other things for their skill in stylishly elegant and minimalist furniture – although the connection with Christ’s profession is unstressed. Lee is played by Amanda Seyfried, with Lewis Pullman as her brother William and Christopher Abbott as her oppressive husband Abraham, who appears to be partial to a bit of BDSM where he gets to be a Christian dom in the marriage bed.
The movie looks sometimes like a Lars von Trier nightmare of ironised martyrdom, or a Robert Eggers horror film like The Witch, and then sometimes like a weird but spectacular Broadway musical melodrama, in which the shaking and shivering of the dancing faithful – ecstatically submitting to divine joy – is shaped into a choreography not unlike the musical Stomp. Atheists and rationalists in the audience might be tempted to ask … well … what is the testament of Ann Lee exactly? What is her message, her legacy for the 21st century?
The answer would appear to be simply this: she established a Christian sect. (Some statistics about follower numbers are given over the closing credits.) Lee fiercely believed that all sex was wrong, and a wicked distraction from the spiritual. No follower in this film is so disloyal as to ask how then is humanity to be saved from dying out? Is it simply a matter of letting people outside the faith keep humanity going with their deplorable activities and the resulting children can be brought into the fold? And the shaking, the shivering, the speaking in tongues, to a modern audience, this will obviously look like collective hysteria and sexual repression, but the film cannot exactly bring itself to endorse this obvious diagnosis, because it wants us to take Lee seriously at some level.
Yet Fastvold is arguably justified in wanting to show that this sexual repression generated enough redirected energy to take a religious group all the way from Manchester to colonial New York, and to make a real contribution to the new enlightenment and the debate over liberty. Lee shouts “Shame!” at a slave auction in this New World of liberty for white people, though it doesn’t occur to her to make abolitionism part of her Christian mission.
This is a genuinely strange film, elusive in both tone and meaning, one which deploys the obvious effects and rhetorical forms of irony, while at the same time distancing itself from these effects and asking its audience to sympathise and even admire Lee, because she is not supposed to be the villain. Fastvold is perhaps asking her audience to take whatever elements from the film they find congenial. An enigmatic ritual that is not for everyone.
• The Testament of Ann Lee screened at the Venice film festival.
