Two conflicting impulses - the upliftingly naughty and the knottily downbeat - work in surprisingly perfect harmony in Wicker, a film in which fairy tale meets sly social satire.
The film is a strange and captivating fable about men and women within and without the institution of marriage navigating both all-consuming destructive envy and the urge to forge life-affirming connections even if they come at a price.
The elevating coalescence of contradictory emotional, sensual and visceral stimuli at the heart of the film turns the deliciously absurd "fairy tale" into a sweet, tender and fervid love story that yields marvellous riches at many levels.
Love and longing are but only one aspect of the parable adapted for the screen by the writing-directing duo of Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson from British writer Ursula Wills' delightfully weird short story, The Wicker Husband.
With Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgard achieving striking chemistry in roles that dwell somewhere between the fantastical and the achingly human, and between playful eroticism and expansive humour, Wicker becomes a movie that can do no wrong even when its flights of fancy appear to strain credulity a touch.
It is a tale with so much heart that its intrinsic lack of logic and the far-fetched quality of the events that it pieces together in service of a commentary on what societal pressures do to people does not take anything away from the darkly comic and adroitly calibrated tone that runs through it.
The characters in Wicker have no names - they are identified by their callings or marital status. The principal figure in the story is the Fisherwoman, embodied brilliantly by Colman, who is ostracised and mocked by the townspeople for being unmarried and for smelling of fish.
Wills' short story was about "an ugly girl" who was "short and dumpy, had one leg a bit shorter than the other and her eyebrows met in the middle". Colman is neither short nor do her eyebrows actually meet but the Fisherwoman does walk with a limp.
Colman's screen presence is magnetic. So, when she turns into an object of carnal ardour after being a long-time spinster with no hope of finding a mate, the transformation isn't difficult at all to accept.
After the Bottlewasher weds, it is the Fisherwoman's turn. But since no man in town is willing to take her as his wife, she trudges to the door of the Basket-Maker (Peter Dinklage), who has his own reasons for detesting the people around him, and asks him to weave her a husband.
A dishy hunk (Skarsgard) made of wicker and plant extracts - material drawn from nature and invested with the potential to sustain and nourish - is duly delivered to the Fisherwoman.
The made-to-order husband is the antithesis of all the other husbands in the village where a collar around the neck symbolises matrimony, where men treat women in a way that gives no leeway to what the latter truly desire.
Mr. Wicker is courteous to a fault, attentive to the needs of the Fisherwoman and forever willing to work towards a turnaround of the Fisherwoman's ramshackle dwelling. He repairs the roof, cleans up the garden and straightens a crooked door - labours of love that arevbeyond the imagination of the flesh and blood make villagers.
For the Fisherwoman, life changes beyond recognition. She now has a man who is as perfect a husband as one can ever be. He is caring and masculine without a trace of toxicity. Above all, he is a great lover.
When it comes to lovemaking, he isn't a man of straw. He pours spontaneous passion into the act and destroys some furniture in the process only to put it all back together again. I live and breathe because of you, he says to the Fisherwoman. He, in turn, breathes life into a grimly patriarchal world where women are mere bodies and hands with rigidly defined roles.
The Fisherwoman acquires an unmistakable glow and triggers jealousy among the villagers, both men and women, because they do not have what she has - genuine fulfilment and happiness.
At the wedding of the Butcher (Phil Daniels), the Fisherwoman and the Wicker Husband dance beautifully. Their easy compatibility and the romance underpinning their togetherness attract the attention of people and gets their goat.
Especially bitter with how things turn out for the Fisherwoman is the Tailor's Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), who conspires with her sister (Marli Siu), the Bottlewasher's wife, to sow seeds of marital discord in the WickervHusband's world.
A wicker baby sought to be passed as an extra-marital love child, suspicion of infidelity, and an act of violence send matters spiralling into chaos.
A man dies in a bid to emulate the Wicker Husband's thoughtful ways with the Fisherwoman. He tries to fix his home's roof. It collapses and he suffers a fall that turns fatal. The tragedy in which she has no hand whatever leads to the Fisherwoman's idyll being thrown into disarray.
The makers of Wicker preserve the spirit of the text while introducing tweaks that make thevfilm markedly less dark and ponderous than the 26-page source of inspiration. It is both unapologetically raunchy - to be sure, it stops short of being in-your-face - and punchy.
They tell the story with an eye on underscoring social myopia, human foibles and a culture of hate and jealousy that feeds off people's misery. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (who won an Oscar for The Brutalist) captures all the lights and shades that define the setting (Wicker was filmed in Hungary) and imparting evocative depth and sweep to the frames.
The audaciously quirky storyline delivers more than just an allegory. Wicker is essentially a satire laced with loads of sardonic wit and absurdist humour that grows on you as the film trundles along on its wild, wicked and whippy course.
Wicker is a basket of luxuriant wonders that is worth dipping into.
-
Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgard, Elizabeth Debicki, Peter Dinklage
