Synopsis
Everything else was a surprise
The arrival of a handsome new farmhand threatens the balance between a farmer and his daughter.
Thou Wast Mild and Lovely
2014 Directed by Josephine Decker
Cast
Director
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Releases by Date
Theatrical
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Germany
Releases by Country
Germany
07 Feb 2014
- Theatrical
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Erotic on a sort of expressionistic level, probably more suspenseful than most contemporary horror films, and I wouldn’t even necessarily call this a horror. Amid the surreality and weirdness there’s also subtle commentary on stockholm syndrome. Embraces its oddities and weird charm the way more films should.
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“My lover is stiller than stillness.”
The more of Josephine Decker’s filmography I see, the more enamored I become with the specific way she constructs her films. There is an addicting quality to the experimentalism she interweaves into her films so naturally.
Her debut feature, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, is not necessarily as strong as her later works but it does show the consistency of her direction, which I really appreciate.
There is an almost dizzying absurdity to the depiction of the plot. That absurdity works exceptionally well when the more experimental segments are being showcased and falls a little short when the story tries to provide exposition through a more conventional lense.
All the same, Decker is a…
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52 films by women 2019: 33/52.
This is a kind of hard and unreasonable thing to say, and I've fought shy of saying it - but does anyone else kind of not trust Josephine Decker? She's been doing a lot of press recently for her breakout film Madeline's Madeline, during which she has come across very well. I've never met her, nor have I met anyone who's met her. I don't have a Google document full of #problematic statements she's made. But something about her sets my introvert alarm clanging in a way I can't get past.
Decker is receiving attention at the moment in her capacity as a serious, independent-minded female auteur, someone who - the subtext goes -…
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Josephine Decker is a very promising director, evidenced by her ability to build distinct sound and image relationships. I just wish she had more faith in her material, as Thou Wast Mild And Lovely goes to such an obvious place of bad faith at the end, where payoff is more important than resolution, and shock value rules the day. Basically not a whole lot happens throughout, and then suddenly everything happens, leaving me wholly unsatisfied with Decker's handling of her characters.
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Incredible that this entire film was shot on an iPhone! Four. An iPhone 4. Strapped to a feral cat. Who wrote the screenplay. A cat in heat.
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Josephine Decker's second effort, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, is both an improvement and a step back in terms of visual storytelling. Once again employing a meandering narrative with chopped-up, experimental visual montages with Ashley Connor amusing herself with focal depths. However, Connor's foggy focus is better utilized in Thou Wast... more so than Butter on the Latch.
Decker showcases a talent for creating unsettling atmospheres, creating tension from nothing but, yet again, all of it is for not as Decker fumbles and stumbles with an uninteresting, borderline-immature narrative. The worst of which presents itself in a number of the montages of disturbing imagery sprinkled throughout, wherein Decker teases the viewer with footage of the narrative's endpoint. As if she…
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The perilous lust at the heart of the murder ballad is brought to squeamish, messy life. If there's anything I really appreciate about Decker's cinema it's how she takes the ingredients of Malickian impressionism and transforms them from spacey transcendentalism into something anxious, ugly, and muddy, in the distinctly physical sense of the word. Thick bright skies and fields that stretch out as far as the eye can see become not paeans to natural beauty but an unbridgeable expanse that traps the three principals together, forcing tensions to boil over and behavior to spike in any number of unpleasantly horny ways. A spiderweb glinting in the sunlight isn't a sign of earthly beauty but an omen that gestures towards the…
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I need to first of all make it clear that the incredible final twenty or so minutes of this film is what makes me like this as much as I do - the preliminary fifty minutes of lead up is, while essential, not particularly great overall.
One of the most charmingly, abstractly disorienting films I've watched for a long time. The passage of time is magically done. I guess you could say it's quite... mild and lovely. **ba dum tss** In the end it becomes a moving statement on not much at all really. I like it, but only to some degree - perhaps in an appreciation for the craft; in the actors absorbing their characters into themselves, in Josephine Decker creating a vison of the most complete form. At most points, though, the film as a whole feels obstructed. I don't know by what - Decker has the craft to one day make a film of the highest order.
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In the Philosophy of Mind course that I teach, I always spend a couple of classes talking about varieties of human consciousness. People tend to assume that other people experience the world in broadly similar terms, so I challenge students with the proposal that everyone else's internal world is radically alien—as different from one's own subjective experience as the subjective experience of an octopus or a bat.
One of the first questions I ask the class whether they think in words or in pictures. It's not clear exactly what that question means, and some students balk at answering, but most people have strong opinions, and it always divides the class. And when you prompt further discussion along these lines, you…
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"Every relationship I’ve had starts as a love story and turns into a horror film. That’s what relationships do — they switch genres." Josephine Decker, The Montreal Gazette
Quand Josephine Decker goes New American Gothic, ça crée du malaise en s'il vous plaît, malaise et inconfort traversés de trouble sexuel qui va en grandissant, et puis qui débarque complètement. Oui, vraiment, complètement. Une cinéaste au style subjectif et sensoriel unique, un film qui déjoue tous nos repères, qui m'a complètement confondu et qui laisse, c'est le moins que l'on puisse dire, une très forte impression.
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