‘On the Sea’ Review: A Stirring, Windblown Romance Between Two Lonely Mussel-Men in Coastal Wales
The instantly immortal Rihanna lyric “We found love in a hopeless place” comes to mind more than once in “On the Sea,” and perhaps unfairly so. The severe, slate-skied stretch of northern Welsh coastline on which Helen Walsh‘s romantic drama plays out may be menaced by the sea and unvisited by the sun, but it’s rather lovely in its own forbidding way. For born-and-bred mussel farmer Jack (Barry Ward), however, it’s a place of ever-narrowing opportunities — both professional, as his modest family business is crowded out by larger fishing enterprises, and personal. Longstanding marriage in a town where everybody knows his name has put paid to desires he’s resigned himself to never exploring — though when they’re stoked by a chance connection with a roughneck stranger, his small world turns altogether suffocating.
Premiering in competition at the Edinburgh Film Festival, Walsh’s second feature arrives a full decade after her first, eye-catching youth portrait “The Violators,” launched at the same fest. (In between came last year’s high-concept Channel 4 teen series “The Gathering.”) “On the Sea” shares with Walsh’s debut a stonily textured sense of place and authentic interest in working-class lives, this time with more assured, even-keeled storytelling. It should at least match the profile of “The Violators,” which had a healthy international festival run and streaming exposure, plus a local arthouse release; LGBT-focused programmers and distributors should take a particular interest.
The film’s opening scenes are pleasingly attentive to the arduous labor and process of Jack’s daily work routine, as worn blue hands dredge crates of mussels from palpably freezing seawater. He shares his business with his bluff, bullying brother Dyfan (Celyn Jones), whose sons are being primed to inherit it from them, the way they did from their father before them. Jack’s sullen teenage boy Tom (Henry Lawfull) is less keen to follow in his dad’s footsteps, seemingly restless to explore the world beyond this small, soggy patch of Wales — and while Jack may not say so out loud, he can certainly relate. Married to his no-nonsense high school sweetheart Maggie (Liz White) and set to ply the family trade until his body gives in, he’s built a stable life for himself, but not an especially soul-nourishing one.
Ward, the fine Irish actor who played the lead in Ken Loach’s “Jimmy’s Hall,” gives Jack a wiry, hungry physicality as well as a drawn, quietly sunken demeanor, with a flitting gaze that never quite meets anyone else’s directly. It’s clear there’s some manner of aching void in him; what it is becomes clear the moment he spots Daniel (an excellent Lorne MacFadyen), a thirty-ish factotum passing through town, spoiling for a fight in the local pub. With his bruiser build and swallow neck tattoo, Daniel seems thuggish on the surface, but Jack immediately recognizes in him some of his own specific sadness. From there, it’s a few short, familiar narrative steps to Jack offering Daniel casual work, and eventually meeting him after hours in the drifter’s shabby caravan.
“On the Sea” may not set out to surprise, but it traces the expected, anguished coming-out arc with rare honesty and frank, bristly sensual abandon — both actors committing with equal parts vulnerable yearning and terse emotional avoidance. The love scenes between the two men are intense and unprettified, leaving a lasting emotional imprint on a hideous green deep-pile carpet. Tactile environmental details are as vital to indoor scenes as those set on the rain-lashed waters, with DP Sam Goldie’s somber, composed lensing giving each space its own tensely overcast quality.
Walsh’s writing is also notably mature regarding the difficulties of coming out in middle age, not least in a family unit: “On the Sea” finds poignancy in complication and compromise rather than easy, empowering short cuts to a happy ending. Jack’s response to Daniel’s accusation that he’s living a lie is entirely fair and a bit heartbreaking: “My marriage isn’t a lie.” A novelist before she was a filmmaker, Walsh is attuned to the roiling, unspoken interior life in all her characters, not crowding matters with dialogue, but allowing these people to watch and eventually see each other. There are no hopeless places or cases in this softly stormy film, just hardened lives coming in from the cold.
