Marine Levéel | La traction des poles (Magnetic Harvest) / 2019

the trials and tribulations of a pig farmer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Marine Levéel (screenwriter and director) La traction des poles (Magnetic Harvest) / 2019 [23 minutes]

 

It’s fascinating to compare a work such Mark Christopher’s 1995 short film Alkali, Iowa about a gay man in a US rural setting and Marine Levéel’s 2019 Magnetic Harvest, which concerns one of France’s New Rurals, also a gay man, in this case a pig farmer. Unlike in the days of Christopher’s film, where the gay men had to meet up from miles around at a local park on weekends to seek out one another’s company, in Levéel’s work, Mickaël (Gilles Vandeweerd) need only send out a cell-phone message to track down the nearest local gay man somewhere in the beautiful French country landscape, even if he’s sometimes beaten out by others who meet up with the messenger faster that he can get there.

 

    But then Mickaël has other things on his mind. As an organic farmer, who allows his pigs to range and feeds them natural foods, he is, at the moment, attempting to get certification from the authorities to describe his pork as organically raised. What’s more his best sirer and favorite hog, Roger, has gone missing.

    And then, out of the blue, he is faced with an apparent madman from the farm next door who suddenly appears with a large piece of machinery to water a field where no crops are supposed to be growing. The madman, it turns out, is his old friend Paul (Victor Fradet) who has been away for several years in New Zealand and has just returned, and the large crop water-feeder has only been employed as a joke to get Mika to recognize that he is back. Paul, whose farm clearly is raising produce instead of pigs, has a large number of machines which he produces from time to time to hone in on Mika just when he least expects it.

      The most unreasonable moment is just as he found a gay meet-up, Ricardo (Thomas Landbo) in a field of yellow rapeseed. Paul shows up in an outsized agricultural digger, sending Ricardo on the run and finding his friend stark naked staring back at him with the shock have having been found out.

    Worse yet, neighbors have purchased a large case of his sausages and pork ribs for a neighborhood barbecue, but not only mock the fact that his pork delicacies do not have the proper fat content that they prefer, but at one point picking up a long string of his hand-made sausages to play a game of limbo, men obscenely dipping under the sausage rope held by two others as if all of Mika’s hard work means absolutely nothing to them.

       Mickaël is so taken aback that he can’t even speak, but Paul, who has also shown up at the party and has just jealously questioned his friend about who his rapeseed partner was, grows angry by the others’ taunts, and attempts to put an end to their mockery. Both he and Mickaël are thrown out, metal stanchions locked in place behind them.

      Mika goes stumbling through the dark to find Paul without success. But suddenly Paul appears, again driving his huge tractor digger, crashing through their stanchions and proving to Mika that he is, in fact, not only willing to stand up for a friend but is also may be in love with him.

      Director Levéel, herself grew up in a small Normandy village and watched as a great many friends left while others stayed on or returned as “new rurals” to farm the land. In an interview with Jamie Lang in Variety she commented: “It’s hard work being a farmer and a lot of movies show that, but it’s not all harshness. I wanted to show something different, more contemporary. I made Magnetic Harvest a little like a fairy tale with its colorful scenes and romantic elements. I wanted to depict sensitive characters in a world where there is hope to change the views people have about rurals.”

      Like Christopher did for US audiences decades earlier, Levéel has reminded us that today’s farmers are far more diverse and contemporary on their views of how to live their lives than we city dwellers often imagine our rural counterparts to be.

 

Los Angeles, April 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).