Consider a ship in a bottle. Crafted precisely, the scaled vessel can be placed carefully into the glass, and made whole and perfect by its design. Of course, one could recklessly try to jam it through the opening, too, just to get it over and done with. Technically every component will be in that bottle, sure enough - but can you really call it a ship at that point?
It's always bold and risky to leap right into making one's first feature-length film, especially with - accordingly - no training or education, and seemingly little experience. But everyone has to start somewhere, and it's not like writer-director Nicholas Ashe Bateman is a total stranger to the industry. I'll give just about anything a try. Regrettably, I'm not sure 'The wanting mare' was worth the effort.
It was a few names in the cast that initially drew me in. For what little I've previously seen of Jordan Monaghan, Kate Lyn Sheil, and Christine Kellogg-Darrin, I saw fine performances, and potential I wished to explore further. To that end, I recognize a glimmer of the actors' skills throughout - these three, and others - and it's probably the best aspect of 'The wanting mare.' Yet no one is truly allowed to flourish in a picture that from the very beginning runs with wild abandon toward its conclusion.
Editing feels excruciatingly unrefined as hard cuts generally shift rapidly not just from shot to shot, but from scene to scene. The film has the duality of feeling fast-paced owing to the disordered, unclean sequencing, yet also slow given a loose narrative, and plot development that's meager or haphazard. I like the music in the film, considered by itself, but it's hard to meaningfully pay it heed as the picture slams forward in a brisk, stuttered gait. Moments that should be affecting - heartfelt, thrilling, profound, tragic - are notably bereft, ripped of substance as the movie leaps right past them, and performances are thusly squandered as well.
To emphasize the point: given the blisteringly quick pace and lack of eventfulness, it feels like we've been watching for only perhaps 15-20 minutes as the timer actually shows that we're two-thirds of the way through.
I appreciate the filming locations, picturesque all on their own. The visual presentation in general is pretty swell - costume design, hair, effects. Lighting is a bit more questionable, just because there seems to consistently be a spotlight on each character in a shot, to the point that it looks artificial. The image quality itself is crisp and clear, yet I'm unsure if that really does 'The wanting mare' any favors, as it serves to highlight how direly inelegant and incomplete the feature is all the way through.
There are fair concepts of story beats scattered throughout, but they hardly feel fully realized. We get the impression that the very underpinnings of the tale, as verbalized in dialogue and voiceovers - a dream, a world that was - were notes jotted on a napkin, meant to serve as the foundation of the film, but then were neglected until the very last moment and hence inserted in the least meaningful ways possible. Perhaps 'The wanting mare' should be treated as an art film, with due consideration for what meaning one can derive from it. But the unwieldy construction of the feature limits our engagement, and perpetuates a cycle in which paper thin material necessitates that swiftness, and the swiftness inhibits the material, and so on. With the overwhelming miasma in mind, the nearest I can come to gleaning a message from the film is a vague, uncertain reflection on the constancy of hopes and dreams across time and space and those things that keep us from achieving them. This doesn't feel like much, and certainly nowhere near as impactful as it should be.
There's also a noticeable subtext about how men lie to, conceal the truth from, thrust their burdens upon, forsake, and freely and thoughtlessly take from women for their own selfish ends. But even as this drift is jarring for an inherent tone so different from the rest of the film - it, too, is subsumed by the indelicate craft of the production. And there's also the problem of being unsure whether this subtext was a conscious choice of Bateman's, or an incongruous fault in his writing.
I didn't know what to expect when I began watching. I wouldn't mind seeing this same cast allowed to give life to another movie. This one, however, they cannot help, even as graceful as they mostly are in their poise. The build of scenes, and of the feature as a whole, is severely forced; every single element needed so desperately to be teased out further, and allowed to simply Be, of its own accord. Instead the movie is shoved through a bottleneck, and the result is just one big jumble.
I had hoped to like 'The wanting mare,' and I do not. I don't know who I would recommend it to, or why. There was potential here, and it was wasted. This should have been so much more than it is.
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