Rent The Juniper Tree (1990)

A Chorus of Bones - The Juniper Tree review by CH

Light upon The Juniper Tree - and light is the word for the shadows and sky of this film - and one might assume that it was made by somebody of a Nordic background. Especially as it includes the young singer Bjork among a cast who ply the hills and retreats of this Icelandic territory. In fact it was the Los Angeles-based graduate Nietzchka Keene who wrote and directed this late-Eighties film, with support from George Lucas, after a university steeping in the Sagas here combined with an unsettling tale by the Brothers Grimm.

Filmed in black and white, effectively so, it never shies from Death when two sisters flee the stoning of their mother as a witch. One of them uses such scorcery to beguile a rugged man into taking up with her, a ruse deplored by his young son who simultaneously finds a rapport with the other sister (who communicates with the dead mother). This is the essence of the story, its resolution not so much a central concern of the narrative as the film's lingering upon a bleak terrain and the animals - birds, shorn sheep, a fly - for whom it is equally, perhaps more comfortably, home.

One might almost expect Bergman's famous hoodie to put in a scythe-clutching appearance, but, no, Nietzchka Keene fashioned something distinctly her own in such a landscape. It leaves one to discover what else she made - and saddened to find that after an elusive television movie in the Nineties, she died at fifty-two near the beginning of the century, several years before Bergman who made it to eighty-nine.

The dvd includes an interesting interview with her - and, among other things, stretches a point with a 1924 short by some Cambridge undergraduates from its Kinema Club: that emoting encounter with a Spirit on a lane somewhere outside that City is more whimsical than The Juniper Tree which cites and is tangentically linked to Eliot's lines about one beneath which "the bones sang, scattered and shining".

One to see again? Perhaps.