The two opposing sensibilities – the exhilaratingly mischievous and the nuttily downbeat – work in surprisingly perfect harmony in Wicker, a film in which fairy tale meets absurd social satire.
The film is a strange and captivating tale about men and women navigating the all-consuming destructive jealousy within and without the institution of marriage and the desire to form life-affirming connections even if they come at a cost.
The heightened juxtaposition of conflicting emotional, sensory and visual stimuli at the heart of the film transforms a deliciously absurd “fairy tale” into a sweet, tender and blossoming love story that delivers on many levels.
British writer Ursula Wills’ delightfully quirky short story, The Wicker Husband, is just one aspect of the screen-to-screen adaptation by the writing-director duo of Alex Huston Fisher and Eleanor Wilson.
With Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård achieving great chemistry in their roles that straddle the lines between brilliant and tragically human, and playful sexuality and expansive humor, Wicker becomes a film that can do no wrong even as its flights of fancy appear to strain credibility.
It’s a story with so much heart that the inherent lack of logic and remote quality of events it adds up to in service of a commentary on how social pressures affect people doesn’t take away from the darkly comic and adroitly calibrated tone it runs through.
Wicker’s characters have no names – they are identified by their call or marital status. The central figure in the story is the fisherwoman, brilliantly portrayed by Coleman, who is ostracized and ridiculed by the townspeople for being unmarried and smelling of fish.
Wills’ short story was about “an ugly girl” who was “short and dumpy, with one leg a little shorter than the other and her eyebrows meeting in the middle”. Coleman isn’t short and her eyebrows don’t really meet but Fisherwoman walks with a limp.
Coleman’s screen presence is magnetic. So, when she turns from being a long-time spinster with no hope of finding a partner into an object of carnal excitement, the change is not at all difficult to accept.
After the bottlewasher’s wedding, it’s the fisherwoman’s turn. But since no man in town is willing to take her as his wife, she arrives at the door of the basket-maker (Peter Dinklage), who has his own reasons for hating the people around her, and asks her for a husband.
A dishy hunk (Skarsgård) made of wicker and plant extracts – materials drawn from nature and invested with the ability to sustain and nourish – is duly delivered to the fisherwoman.
The orderly husband is the antithesis of all the other husbands in the village where a collar around the neck is a symbol of marriage, where men treat women in a way that leaves no room for the latter’s real desire.
Mr. Wicker is polite to a fault, attentive to the needs of the fisherwoman and forever willing to work to transform the fisherwoman’s ramshackle abode. He repairs the roof, cleans the garden and straightens a crooked gate – labors of love beyond the imagination of the flesh-and-blood villagers.
For the Fisherwoman, life changes beyond recognition. She now has a man who is as good a husband as anyone could ever be. He is caring and masculine without a trace of toxicity. Above all, he is a great lover.
When it comes to lovemaking, he is not a straw man. He pours his passion into the act and destroys some furniture in the process only to put it back together. I live and breathe because of you, he tells the fisherman. He, in turn, breathes life into a grimly patriarchal world where women are mere bodies and hands in rigidly defined roles.
The fisherwoman takes on an uncanny glow and arouses the envy of the villagers, both men and women, because they do not have what she has—real fulfillment and happiness.
At the butcher’s (Phil Daniels) wedding, the fisherwoman and the vicar husband dance beautifully. Their easy compatibility and the romance that shows their togetherness attracts people’s attention and gets their goat.
Especially how things change for Fisherwoman, the Taylor’s wife (Elizabeth Debicki), who conspires with her sister (Marlee Siu), the bottlewasher’s wife, to sow the seeds of marital discord in Wickerhusband’s world.
An attempt to pass off a vicar as an extra-marital love child, suspicion of infidelity, and acts of violence send the affair into chaos.
A man dies trying to imitate the thinking ways of a crooked husband with a fisherwoman. He tries to fix the roof of his house. It collapses and he falls which becomes fatal. Tragedy in which she has no hand, the statue of the Fisherwoman is thrown into disrepair.
Wicker’s producers preserve the spirit of the text while introducing tweaks that make the film even less dark and brooding than the 26-page source of inspiration. It’s both unapologetically clumsy — it stops being in-your-face, to be sure — and punchy.
They tell the story with a view to underlining the social myopia, human frailties and the culture of hatred and envy that drowns out people’s suffering. Cinematographer Lol Crawley (who won an Oscar for The Brutalist) captures all the lights and shades that define the setting (Vicker was filmed in Hungary) and gives the frames evocative depth and sweep.
The bold satirical story provides more than just an allegory. Wicker is essentially a satire full of wry wit and wry humor that grows on you as the film meanders along its wild, wicked and whippy course.
Wicker is a basket of wonderful wonders worth diving into.