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She has been a long time coming, but Fanny Lye certainly does deliver
Dir/scr/ed/music: Thomas Clay. UK. 2019. 110 mins
Young British auteur Thomas Clay and his opus Fanny Lye Deliver’d have been curiously missing in action: undelivered, as it were. His last film was Soi Cowboy in 2008, while Fanny Lye shot in late 2015/early 2016 on location in Britain’s bucolic, sodden Shropshire. Such delays normally don’t bode well for a film; but this religious-themed drama set during Britain’s inter-regnum turns out to be anything but normal. The credits give a clue: five (roof) thatchers were used on one purpose-built 360-degree location set; that stunning full orchestral score turns out to be comprised only of instruments used during the Cromwellian era. Clay himself directed, wrote, edited and scored. It’s hard to summarise Fanny accurately without giving too much away; certainly a decade of work is up on the screen in glorious 35mm in a film that seems certain to achieve the same cult status of its antecedents.
A supremely game Charles Dance is knocked up and down a field in England
These would include a meld of anything from Barry Lydon to the splatter of Witchfinder General; Clay himself refers to it as a ‘Puritan Western’ and makes reference to Heaven’s Gate and Days Of Heaven in his attempts to replicate the conditions of an obsessively-authentic 1970s studio film about the mid-1600s. Authentic, pastoral, feminist, and...