Earth Signs: Reading the Post-Pastoral in Alice Rohrwacher’s ‘The Wonders’ (‘Le Meraviglie’)

There is a scene in Alice Rohrwacher’s 2014 film The Wonders (Le Meraviglie) in which the protagonist Gelsomina, the eldest daughter of a family of beekeepers living an isolated rural existence in Northern Italy, stands beside a shaft of bright sunlight that has pierced the roof of their barn. Solemnly, she commands her younger sister to “drink”. With cupped hands, Marinella stoops and sips from the liquid light, quizzical but obedient. The scene depicts, with numinous beauty, a family finding real and imaginative sustenance in nature and its elements. It points to the interconnection between landscape and inhabitant: the family work the land, grow on it as they themselves are grown by it, in a mutual exchange that is spiritual as well as somatic. Not yet having reduced their environment to terms of economic utility the girls see wonder and mystery in nature, and are fed by it like the plants they tend to.

Impressionistic and quietly observant, the film pairs intimate naturalism with dreamy surreality, approaching, but never quite surrendering to magical realism. Hélène Louvart, the film’s cinematographer, has spoken of the ‘poetry’ and ‘febrility’ of the Super 16 stock on which the film was shot, something that lends it the quality of a fever dream. The story, too, reads like a fable: “Is it possible to tell reality like a fairy tale?” Rohrwacher asks.¹ In place of a son, the erratic ideologue Wolfgang is priming Gelsomina (eldest sister to Marinella, Caterina and Luna, and ‘Gelso’ to her family) to one day take over the small honey farm that provides their meagre income. Their days start early, and are spent tending to the hives, loading the honeycombs into a clattering centrifuge, and keeping an eye on the thick, amber liquid as it oozes slowly into a waiting bucket. The family struggle to make a living off the land: Wolfgang stubbornly refuses to bring the farm up to date with modern technological progress, and the burden of his intransigence weighs heavily on Gelso. One afternoon the girls encounter a TV crew filming for the televised competition ‘Countryside Wonders’, a surreal, garish performance of nostalgia for a supposedly long-lost Etruscan way of life. Hosted by a trashy but ethereal Monica Bellucci in glittering Roman garb, the competition invites local families to showcase their produce and compete to best represent the noble values of this simple rustic tradition. Beguiled by possibility, Gelso secretly enters the family into the competition, and we watch as the bittersweet consequences shake their intricate family dynamic and sense of agrarian identity in an ever-advancing world.

The landscape in The Wonders has a folkloric significance, one that is woven tightly into the fabric of the family’s lives: there’s a sense of deep time, of truths and histories grounded in the earth, and this is accompanied by an equally strong vein of symbolism that permeates the land, making metaphor out of matter. The beam of golden light from which the girls drink is as substantial as the gleaming honey that is their livelihood. Given that scene alone, you’d be forgiven for characterising The Wonders as a romantic portrait of a bucolic, bohemian existence in the Italian wilderness. The film has been variously described as a “gentle pastoral comedy”, a “sweet-natured coming of age story” and a “rural rite-of-passage drama”.²³⁴ But these analyses overlook the central dissonance that underpins and pervades the film: that between a land that yields, and one that resists. If we recognise the pastoral as a genre typified by sun-drenched summers, bountiful harvests and boughs heaving with ripe fruit, then The Wonders is something else entirely. Its world is no idyllic retreat from the corrupting influence of society, and the labour it depicts is not the easy exchange of toil for crop through which post-war Italian cinema criticised the consequences of rapid industrialisation. This is a landscape of dissonance: not Arcadian, but Anthropocenic, and praise for the ‘timelessness’ of the film also overlooks the very contemporary forces set against its characters. New European Agricultural laws threaten the farm’s old-school methods. Worse, the bees are dying. Wolfgang’s fatalistic diagnosis of “plague” turns out not to be so far-fetched when they discover that toxic chemicals from a neighbour’s industrial insecticide have seeped into the soil and polluted its ecosystem. Outraged, Wolfgang demands: “What did you put on the fields? You mustn’t use this, it’s lethal”. When his neighbour cites the authority of the local Farmers’ Association, Wolfgang retorts: “These guys are killing you”. The dawn prognostications (“The Earth is dying!”) that he bellows from the bedframe he has moved outside so as to scare off illegal poachers take on a new significance in this context. The degradation of the land might be what Rob Nixon describes as a ‘slow violence’, but it’s an urgent one nonetheless.⁵

This latent darkness perhaps explains the tendency for critics to fixate on the overtly pastoral elements of the film. Much has been made, for example, of Gelso’s apparent affinity for the bees: she follows their course instinctively when Wolfgang cannot, as though sensing the invisible lines of their desire. Close-up shots of her fingers untangling their quivering insect legs have a wordless lyricism and prefigure the most symbolic gesture of trust: her hands part to reveal a bee crawling out from between her parted lips and over her smiling face. It’s an enchanting image, but this magic trick is just that: a trick, an illusion of human-creature communion. The reality, as Rohrwacher eventually shows, is that this familiarity is nothing more than an accumulated effect of a life lived close to the land. These bees are not the insects of Andrea Arnold’s American Honey, which buzz faintly against windowpanes, mimicking the plight and confinement of the heroine. Neither are they those of Debra Granik’s recent film Leave No Trace, in which the beehive functions merely as a wholesome metaphor for cooperation, a “figure for (nonhuman) community”.⁶ Like Louvart, Granik’s camera lingers on ‘honey-soaked hands’, but here honey bees are a ‘mere symbolic vehicle for human-to-human connection’.⁷ The filmic convention that uses animals as ciphers for human emotion is behind these anthropomorphic misreadings of The Wonders, and it’s this same impulse towards instrumentalisation that has brought on our current ecological crisis.

The urge to anthropomorphise, to render the natural world a mere reflection of human subjectivity, is described by philosopher Jane Bennett in her thing-theory manifesto Vibrant Matter (2009). She encourages us to imagine the ‘vital materialism’ that runs through all non-human matter, and to recognise these bodies as “bona fide participants rather than recalcitrant objects, social constructs, or instrumentalities”.⁸ The image of the bee crawling slowly over Gelsomina’s lips is significant, not because it points to some kind of psychic human-creature connection, but because it seems to suggest a kind of porous boundary between girl-body and bee-body. In doing so, it looks both backwards towards a time when the boundaries between animal and human were less rigid, an earlier world of myth and metamorphoses, and ahead toward the idea of the ‘mesh’ – dark ecologist Timothy Morton’s concept for describing the interconnectedness of matter, consisting of ‘infinite connections and infinitesimal differences’.⁹ In The Ecological Thought (2010), Morton writes about the interdependence between life forms and how an apprehension of this matrix could generate a ‘re-enchantment’ with the natural world. The ‘enmeshed’, open and uncertain quality of bodies, both physical and abstract, under the conditions of the Anthropocene means they have the capacity, even the tendency, to leave marks on those who encounter them.¹⁰ When Gelso and Wolfgang are surprised by a storm while inspecting the hives, they are forced to clamber on top of the hives and lie across the lids to prevent them blowing off in the wind. The red welts that mark Gelso across her left eye are proof that the bees are not her pets and have no loyalty to her. Likewise, the obstinate camel that Wolfgang brings home to the girls as a gift does not entertain them as he’d imagined and prefers instead to remain still. Tethered to a miniature carousel in the garden, the camel is a comic reminder of Wolfgang’s futile attempts to master his environment. To borrow Bruno Latour’s term, these creatures are ‘actants’: agental, capable of effecting change, but ultimately wild and unfathomable. This is nothing to lament: Morton warns that “Intimacy […] becomes threatening because it veils the mesh beneath the illusion of familiarity.”¹¹

The ‘thing-power’ of Rohrwacher’s non-human subjects manifests in their resistance of easy instrumentalisation or personification. It extends beyond the animals of the film to other forms of matter, too. As much as the threat of resource scarcity haunts the film, nature proves that excess can be equally calamitous. After Wolfgang arranges to take on a young German boy Martin from a youth offenders programme, he leaves the farm to finalise the deal, leaving Gelsomina in charge. In his absence, Marinella cuts her hand open on the centrifuge and after she is rushed to hospital, Gelsomina suddenly realises that not one of them has remembered to swap the honey bucket. They return to find it overflowing, dark viscous honey spreading thickly over the linoleum. In their efforts to return it to the bucket and avoid their father’s ire, the children become coated in the sugary sap. This spectacle of surplus reminds us that nature is not mere brute matter: it is ungovernable, unbounded, “lively and self-organising”, spreading and extending itself beyond the confines put in place for its containment.¹² We could draw a parallel with the ‘ooze’ of oil and slime mould that features in the work of Morton and other theorists of the Anthropocene. Along with “mists […] blobs, slime, clouds, and muck”, these life forms offer metaphors for the ubiquitous, rhizomatic modes in which networks of knowledge and power are produced, elaborated and contained in an era of economic and environmental disintegration.¹³

If the scarce, the toxic and the hybrid are all hallmarks of our current environmental crisis, then a case can be made for The Wonders as a ‘post-pastoral’ project, a term proposed by Terry Gifford for work that complicates or disputes the lazy equation of rural life with Romantic simplicity.¹⁴ Comparisons between The Wonders and Bertolucci’s 1900 (1976), or Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978), are predictable but limited. It’s true that the film’s candour, its naturalistic depiction of the girls’ bodies in all their realness (spitting, bleeding, defecating) is certainly indebted to Italian Neorealism, but Olmi’s gently rippling cornfields are a far cry from Rohrwacher’s fractured landscape. Beneath the film’s broader themes of adolescence, community and authenticity lies an anxious apprehension that the earth on which these dramas are played out is becoming new and uncertain ground. The Wonders therefore occupies an uneasy place in relation to the category of the pastoral: neither a straightforward lament for the loss of rural traditions, nor a grey, dystopian anti-pastoral.

Towards the end of the film, the culmination of the ‘Countryside Wonders’ competition is televised from the caves of the nearby Necropolis, which until now has been a playground for the children. The following pantomime of technicolour nostalgia is neatly indicative of Rohrwacher’s attitude towards the pastoral both as an artistic mode and as a tool by which we avoid our share of responsibility for environmental degradation. The show, like some nightmarish historical re-enactment, apes an idealised version of history and stages a quest for authenticity that ends in cannibalisation and commodification. When asked to describe his product, Wolfgang is lost for words. “It’s honey,” he mumbles. “Natural, and… virgin… It’s natural, we don’t… We don’t add anything to it…” The sad irony being, of course, that the honey never was and could never be ‘natural’, being made from the nectar of plants grown in soil corrupted by human intervention. Gelsomina’s bee trick, accompanied by Martin’s eerie whistling, is met with bemusement and the awkward laughter of their Fellini-esque hostess. In the end, a neighbouring family resplendent in faux-fur and plastic wild boar headdresses, win with their traditionally cured meats. The son, the same neighbour who earlier defended his use of chemical insecticides, reveals that he will use the prize money to convert his farm into a hotel so that tourists can enjoy the area’s natural beauty.

It does The Wonders a disservice to search for a fixed polemic or perspective, especially given its depiction of the consequences of ideology. Rather, Rohrwacher chooses to quietly observe the ways in which nature can, as Bennett describes, “aid or destroy, enrich or disable, ennoble or degrade us”.¹⁵ And yet, the film appears to make a final capitulative gesture to the genre after the competition draws to a close. While the crowds disperse and travel back to the mainland, Martin, disturbed by the disruption of their ordinary routine and overwhelmed by the frenzy of emotion, takes refuge in the wooded cave-maze of the Necropolis. Gelsomina tracks him down, and in the film’s most dreamlike sequence the two play together by the fire, the flames throwing shadows of their dancing limbs onto the walls. These are stolen moments: the Georgic sanctuary of the Necropolis has been tainted since the TV crew made it the painted backdrop to their psychedelic charade. This reverie is a pause in time, a temporary suspension of disbelief in which we are allowed to forget the dying bees, the toxins lurking in the soil, and the fact of the family’s immanent eviction. But we’re left with an impression of the purity of pre-reflective engagement with nature that children are capable of, before the atrophy of nostalgia sets in. As Morton says: “The ecological ‘enchants the world,’ if enchantment means exploring the profound and wonderful openness and intimacy of the mesh.”¹⁶

1 Buder, Emily, 5 December 2016, Alice Rohrwacher on Why You Have to Go into the Void to Make Good Movies, The No Film School Podcast, available at https://nofilmschool.com/2016/12/alice-rohrwacher-interview, accessed 20 July 20^th 2018. 2 Mumford, Gwilyn, ‘Happy as Lazzaro review – beguiling fable of golden, rural Italy trampled by modernity’, The Guardian, 14 May 2018. 3 Bradshaw, Peter, ‘The Wonders review – a likable, if sentimental, coming-of-age-movie’, The Guardian, 16 July 2015. 4 Kermode, Mark, ‘The Wonders (Le Meraviglie) review – magical realism, marvelous casting’, The Guardian, 19 July 2015. 5 Nixon, Rob, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Harvard University Press, 2011. 6 Paveck, Hannah, ‘Care at the Margins: Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace (2018)’, Another Gaze, 20 July 2018. 7 Ibid. 8 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2009, x.9 Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010, p.30. 10 Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 11 Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010, p.41. 12 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, preface, 2009, 10. 13 Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet, Zero Books, 2011, 9. 14 Gifford, Terry, Pastoral, Psychology Press, 1999. 15 Bennett, Jane, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Duke University Press, 2009, ix. 16 Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought, Harvard University Press, 2010, 104.