Rose of Nevada: Crashing Against the Waves of a Nonexistent Future

It takes a particular sort of mental fortitude for one to be willing and able to cast themselves out to sea for prolonged bouts of back-breaking solitude; to set off with the limited company of other cold fish who set one beady eye on the bow of the ship and the other on the drink below deck that will numb their boredom at day’s end. For some, a seafaring job comes with the added stress that this laborious venture away from home is just about the only means of providing for the very people—the very town—they’re forced to leave on a daily basis; worse still is the growing realization that this daily ritual of mental and physical sacrifice is so often followed by the spectre of obsolescence, as the one means of putting food on the table becomes just another relic of a place submerged by the slow suffocation of time.

Perhaps this is why writer-director Mark Jenkin’s Rose of Nevada registers like a strange tonal cross between the frigid remove of Peter Strickland and the textured seaside madness of The Lighthouse (with a dash of Shane Carruth’s time-bending emotional impenetrability for good measure). In Cornwall, the slow death of the local fishing industry is like watching the Titanic sink in real-time, but for these locals, there is no legendary reputation for a disaster immortalized by the seismic presence of its calamity; in Cornwall, there is only the loss, and the constant sinking feeling left every time you look out beyond the shore and remember what won’t be coming back across the horizon.

This was the assumption that the Cornish locals had when the fishing boat Rose of Nevada disappeared at sea some thirty years ago, the ship’s crew lost to the tide along with the ill-fated vessel. Suffice it to say, when the ship suddenly washes back to shore unmanned, the pervading tragedy of its disappearance that had plagued the town for decades suddenly gives way to an ominous opportunity to find economic stability in the vastness of the plentiful ocean. For struggling father Nick (MacKay) and wayward dock worker Liam (Turner), this is a chance too lucrative to pass up.

The first day at sea is a challenging but rewarding one, though the return trip to Cornwall proves even more taxing on the men when they realize which version of Cornwall they’ve returned to; with no explanation, the Rose of Nevada seems to have brought them back in time some 30 years. Now, everyone takes Nick for the ship’s original lost crew-mate Luke, while Liam slots himself easily into the place of another of the ship’s lost riders, an absentee father named Alan. How and why the ship has taken them back in time remains a mystery, and all that can be done is to head back onto the boat each day in the hopes that the next landing might be the one that takes them back home.

This is of far greater concern to Nick than Liam, as Turner’s arrogant demeanour finds him quite at home in another man’s family while MacKay is left to widen his ever-shifting eyes in sheer terror at the prospect that he might never get back to his own. Combined with the generally static atmosphere of Jenkin’s suffocating 16mm framing—you can count on one hand how often the camera moves in this film, and possibly on one finger if you discount those times where movement is simply attributable to the rocking of the titular ship—Rose of Nevada boxes itself into an imprisoning view of a society desecrated by the limits and eventual abandonment of its one viable source of income.

It’s a compelling view for Jenkin to take, and one that lends itself to the surreal touches of the director’s own editing (in a real Hong Sang-soo move, Jenkin directed, wrote, shot, edited and scored the film himself), but it’s also one that leaves much to be desired when the depiction of Cornwall’s fracturing economic identity is so stringently tied to a direct departure from it. The fishing trips themselves prove repetitive and diminishing in their impact, while Jenkin’s own view of Cornwall itself doesn’t provide much in the way of a detailed view of this emotional desolation outside a few cursory verbalizations from side characters about the internal distance they feel.

For a film so attached to the visceral sensation of its own fracturing, Rose of Nevada hardly allows itself to be anchored to any detailed understanding of its setting beyond the implication of an apparition.

still courtesy of Vortex Media

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Julian Malandruccolo

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