Film-maker Ben Rivers, one of the doyens of Britain’s small but stubborn-as-bindweed experimental film scene, catches up with Scottish recluse Jake Williams, the subject of his2011 film Two Years at Seaand, before that, his 2006 short This Is My Land. All three films never deign to tell viewers much at all about Williams, who spends great chunks of the film doing almost nothing, like sleeping by a tree, taking a bath, or just pottering about at his home, Bogancloch in Aberdeenshire.
However, there are oblique hints in plain sight if you look closely. In the bric-a-brac of Williams’ digs and the closeup shots Rivers inserts of some of Williams’ scratched and smudged photographs of places around the world he’s once visited, one of which shows the subject as a young man with a resplendent head of red hair. These days, his scalpline has much receded and both head hair and luxurious beard have turned white as a goblin, which at least makes him of a piece with the silvery black and white 16mm film stock Rivers shoots the film on. When he cuts away to those rumpled photographs, everything suddenly goes into colour. If that stab of pigment doesn’t shake you up, wait until Rivers breaks out the drone for a spectacular final shot.
Not quite a documentary and not quite a work of fiction either, this is a contemplative curio that gets across that Williams himself leads a liminal life on the edge of society but not entirely separate from it. We see him meeting hikers in the wood and enjoying a visit from a choir around a campfire who sing a spectacular folk song in Scots dialect that’s about an argument between life and death. He even teaches some schoolkids about the solar system with an assist from a giant umbrella, although they all clear off as fleet as foxes when the bell rings.
But Jake seems like a happy soul for all his solitude, happy to sing a song to himself and have a friendly conversation with his talkative cat, with whom in one early scene he shares a roadkill feast. It looks like a pretty mellow, content sort of life from where I’m standing, and not much different than that of your average self-employed home-based worker, but with more snow and silence.
Bogancloch is in UK cinemas from 30 May.