22/11/2023 - In Marc Isaacs’ latest documentary, the UK is closely scrutinised, observed like an object both precious and foreign, known and completely alien

This Blessed Plot, by multi-award-winning British director Marc Isaacs, which had its world premiere at Doclisboa and was then shown at IDFA (in the Signed section), shows with a lot of creativity and a healthy dose of absurdism the adventures of people who reject reality as we know it, poetic and deliberately strange characters who observe the world around them with enchanted eyes. After making fourteen films, many of which were awarded in international festivals or recipients of important honours such as, for example, the Grierson Award, the Royal Television Society Programme Award and the BAFTA, Marc Isaacs is once again interested in the hidden corners of an England unknown to many, a parallel universe steeped in surrealism where time seems to have stopped indefinitely. Across his many films, Isaacs has known how to shed light the oddities, the joy but also the endemic melancholy of people who live in urban landscapes they are viscerally linked to, places that are full of life, multicultural and multifaceted, or in more traditional and isolated villages.

This Blessed Plot is both the title of the film and of a speech made by John of Gaunt on the deathbed of Richard II in Shakespeare, a speech in which the protagonist sings the praises of England, his land. Marc Isaacs starts from this eulogy by deconstructing its internal logic, highlighting its grey areas and ambiguities. As in all his films, the director examines the social and cultural fabric of the UK through an explosive mix of documentary and fiction, this time entirely set in Essex. 

Lori, a young Chinese director, visits the historical village of Thaxted where Pier Paolo Pasolini shot parts of his epic The Canterbury Tales, a typical British village with quite a few skeletons in its closet. Determined to find a subject for her film, the protagonist attentively listens to the stories of the Thaxted inhabitants, their mysterious tales of a past more complex and ambiguous than what, at first, one might have expected. Among them is the story of the 20th century socialist vicar Conrad Noel, spokesman for a “Christian Socialism” still very exotic for Lori. 

Increasingly intrigued by a culture so different from hers, the protagonist talks to the spirit of Noel and looks for similarities between the communism she is used to and that supported by the English vicar. On her journey to enlightenment, Lori meets locals who speak to her, with almost mystical passion, about love, pain, loss and separation. Accompanied by these characters both funny and dramatic, which include Keith, Sue, Maggie, Norman and her "uncle", Lori lets herself be seduced by English folklore and spirituality.

This Blessed Plot analyses in both a clinical and poetic mode the concept of “Englishness,” the myths that surround it as well as the fanaticism of those who avidly feed on them in search of a national identity that constantly gets out of hand. The ghosts, the voices of a past that will not return, fuel the entire film, transforming it into a complex work that challenges the borders between myth and reality, waking life and dreams.

This Blessed Plot was produced by Marc Isaacs. International sales are handled by Andana Films.

(Translated from Italian)