Splendidly wrought and fraught, this rough-country romance is worth every second of love and loss.
The World to Come
“Meeting you has made my day.” Abigail (Katherine Waterston)
“Oh, how pleasant and uncommon it is to make someone's day.” Tallie (Virginia Kirby)
A period love story set in mid-19th century upstate New York rough country, The World to Come is as gentle and appealing a romance as you will see all year. Although the lovers are two women, they could as well be man and woman or two men to the same satisfactory results. It’s really about survival through love, connecting with another who makes your day.
Imaginative and bookish Abigale and independent and sensualist Tallie live near each other with husband farmers who don’t fill the emotional needs of these intelligent, durable women. A cartography motif helps place their farms’ locations but more so the map of their souls. Director Mona Fastvold takes a soft approach for them at first, until a little later their affection for each other crystallizes.
The perspective is symbolically chaste throughout because sensuality was never the reason for their passion—it rested in a shared need to express the poetry of their lives coming out of desolate conditions that beg for the lyrical mind to transform into beauty. Daniel Blumberg’s lonely clarinet score punctuates the storms outside and inside with minor key authority allowing the women room to expound.
Given that the writers of the original story and screenplay are men (Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard), a masculine orientation is barely there. Given that men might favor the more visceral shots, Fastvold has numerous bird's-eye shots of the farmsteads, which are lovely in the right weather but harrowing in the wrong. The East can be brutal in winter, and the men suffer for the defeating conditions.
Not only does the frigid weather of their own marriages push the women together, but also their need to be descriptive about their struggles—and they give each in their own ways verbal sustenance that seems at times to transcend the inevitable sensuality. Each woman is unusually articulate, making for an allure with which not even handsome men can compete.
The World to Come is not the flamboyant Portrait of a Lady on Fire; rather it is a frontier romance peopled by hyper-smart women and hard-pressed men, all of whom give a full measure with minimalist flourishes to a grateful audience. A superior experience.
“This morning, ice in our bedroom for the first time all winter.” Katherine in voiceover.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com
