Rose of Nevada gets its title from a small, rusty fishing boat that went out to sea 30 years ago with a small crew and never returned. But here it comes floating back into port with no one aboard, like the ghostly Mary Celeste, and its original owner cleans it up and puts it back into commission. As if it never left.
When the boat went missing, the British coastal village of Cornwall was bustling. Like the Rose of Nevada, it’s now a shell of its former self. Storefronts have shuttered. Work has dried up. People have left. Writer-director Mark Jenkin lives and makes all his films in Cornwall, and he understands its disparities inside and out: the rustic buildings that sit amidst picture-postcard landscapes, the locals scraping by while tourists relax on the ritzier side of town.
Jenkin typically casts his friends and local actors, but this is the first time he’s worked with established performers. George Mackay plays Nick, who’s looking to fix up his crumbling house and provide for his wife and young child, and Callum Turner plays Liam, a drifter who sleeps on the docks.
They both need jobs, so they sign up to go out on Rose of Nevada’s second maiden voyage, along with an old-salt captain who’s right out of a sea shanty. But when they return to Cornwall after a couple rough days at sea, it appears that the town has been transported back to 1993. The local pub is once again full of people, local businesses are open, the old-timers are all much younger. And everyone seems to think Nick and Liam are the men who went missing on the Rose of Nevada all those years ago.
Jenkin’s movies are primarily about the details and textures of places — chipped paint, cracked roofs, plants growing up through rocks, seaside towns battered by centuries of salty air — and that extends to their look. He shoots on a handcranked 16mm camera with unsynchronized audio, and you can practically feel the celluloid running through it. It’s scratchy, jumpy and occasionally overexposed, so that blooms of yellowish-orange consume the screen while the soundtrack pops and hisses. It’s as if they’ve been beamed onto 21st-century theater screens from another era.
Rose of Nevada forms a loose thematic trilogy with Jenkin’s previous features, Bait and Enys Men, and all three are exploring isolation, poverty, nature and the ways that the past and present intertwine. I’ve grown weary of narratives about time travel, time loops and alternate timelines, which is all Hollywood seemed to care about for a while, but Jenkin finds intriguing wrinkles in a Twilight Zone premise.
Nick is totally unmoored by the time jump; he’s left a family behind, and he can’t get back to them. But Liam is oddly empowered by it; now he has a home and a family, and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to stay. It’s as if they’ve swapped circumstances, and yet they’re both still stuck in the purgatory of the working class, their livelihoods dependent on an industry that will eventually betray them.
Nathan Weinbender is one of the film critics heard on Spokane Public Radio’s Movies 101, Friday evenings at 6:30 and Saturday afternoons at 2 on SPR News.