Euronews Culture’s Film of the Week: ‘Wicker’

This frequently amusing fairytale about emancipation is also a very sweet-natured story that isn’t the raunchy sexcapade the viral trailers might have led you to believe…

In “The Little Prince”, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “It is lonely when you’re among people, too.”

A local Fisherwoman (Olivia Coleman) knows a thing or two about that. Called out by the villagers (all nameless and identified by either their profession or marital status) for smelling and her shabby appearance, she is regularly insulted and largely ostracized. To make matters worse within the conservative community, she does not care for the archaic rituals of the townsfolk – specifically the rites linked to marriage. In this town, a wedding involves a collar being placed around a woman’s neck, and the love the villagers profess feels to the Fisherwoman as “more a burden than a prize”.

Still, she is lonely and fed up with the passive-aggressive comments made by the Tailor’s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki). In a bid to not finish her days as the village spinster, she visits the Basket Weaver in the woods (Peter Dinklage) and asks him to make her a husband.

A month later, the artisan delivers. She shows up to the chapel to meet her strange commission: a Wicker Husband (Alexander Skarsgård). He’s an imposing figure, a gentle giant entirely weaved from osier. And he’s a dishy one at that, with the intrigued tradwives admiring the wickerwork and wondering about his… woody stem.

As the new couple enmesh, it’s clear that his presence disrupts the established order. The Wicker Husband is everything the other spouses aren’t: attentive, sweet, and dynamite in the sack – to the extent the Fisherwoman’s bed needs constant repairing.

Before you ask, no, the matter of possible splinters resulting from vigorous lovemaking is not answered. Just go with it and accept vaginitis just isn’t a thing in this magical world.

As marital bliss continues to blossom, the local men become insecure about the standards being raised, the women start to question the meaning of domestic perfection when faced with such seemingly authentic love, and unfulfilled queen bee Tailor’s Wife isn’t having any of it. She begins to scheme in order to preserve the sanctity of humdrum routines…

Like “The Little Prince”, Wicker deals with themes of loneliness, love, loss, and human nature. It’s a frequently amusing fairytale about emancipation, but also a very sweet-natured story that isn’t the raunchy sexcapade the viral trailers might have led you to believe.

Adapting Ursula Wills’ shot fable, “The Wicker Husband”, directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson choose to indulge in some sauciness but are far more interested in creating a period fable about the shackling nature of social conventions. More to the point, how happiness can be threatened by collective repression decrying from pervasive misogyny and accepted social limitations.

Throughout, the always flawless Coleman anchors the premise’s initial outlandishness with palpably sincere emotional underpinnings, while Skarsgård excels in a role that doesn’t seem to require much – but does. He’s not just “fuckable furniture” but a being created, like Pinocchio, with the ability to choose his own character. Skarsgård wisely underplays the role and chooses to lean on the stellar work from Wētā Workshop, whose design of the Wicker Husband is superb. The creative team employ terrific practical effects and prosthetics, which allow the actor to toe the line between creature with apparently little agency and man with a soulful core.

Where Wicker comes slightly undone is in failing to commit to irresistible weirdness. While it commendably avoids saccharine pitfalls and nails some of the irreverence, a premise this promising, sold by performers who more than understood the assignment, deserved a more offbeat and memorable execution in its second-half.

It all hinges on a tragic moment of impulsiveness, during which Coleman shines. She is able to play up to the whimsical tone when needed but, crucially, manages to ground the emotions with poignant and believable pathos. However, the decision to ultimately embrace a happy-end feels like it undercuts some of the film’s Brothers Grimm potential, as well as the musings on the necessary impermanence of love.

Or – without spoiling a twist – how succumbing to the pressures of the hivemind can curse happiness, but also possibly lead to a different iteration of unconditional love.

Granted, the finale delivers a thorny morality tale denouement that is wickedly delightful; but a bolder, more heart-wrenching unravelling could have made Wicker more impactful.

Add to this some underused cast members (chiefly a cameoing Richard E. Grant) and the fact that Dinklage’s soliloquies don’t quite land – despite a promising opening voice-over about a fish in the Arctic Sea that caught its own reflection (“At first it attacked its reflected self. Then it became jealous of its shimmering scales. Then it tried to fuck itself. Then it died. Safer not to see your fishy self at all”), and Wicker doesn’t quite live up to its full potential.

For a film about a woman who refuses to dance to the accepted choreography (literally at one point), you end up wishing the film had mimicked its protagonist a bit more by taking one final risk. Wicker settles for being an entertaining and charming fairytale, which is no bad thing. But a stranger and darker fable was within reach.

Wicker is out in cinemas now.

Source: www.euronews.com