Thou Wast Mild and Lovely Josephine Decker

Thou Wast Mild and Lovely Josephine Decker

Thou Wast Mild and Lovely

2014 / dir: Josephine Decker / 76 min

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Director Josephine Decker’s highly-acclaimed second feature unfolds with the lyricism and inexorable sense of tragedy of an ancient Appalachian murder ballad. Indie icon Joe Swanberg (director of Happy Christmas and Drinking Buddies) delivers a beautifully understated performance as Akin, a soft-spoken farmworker who takes a summer job working for the belligerent, domineering Jeremiah (Robert Longstreet), who lives in incestuous isolation with his daughter. Sophie Traub’s performance as the daughter, Sarah, has the sun-dappled quality of one of Andrew Wyeth’s Helga paintings: hers is a completely innocent and destructive sexuality, overripe to the point of bursting.

Decker’s vision of Paradise Lost – dew clinging to a spider’s web, the insistent hum of insects, a young girl writhing on the grass – is unforgettably poetic and erotic, and seems to echo down from ages past.

“Like most classic stories, this one is simple, but its realisation is so surprising in its details, so original in its visual invention, as to make most other movies seem shot by the numbers.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

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