Two Years at Sea

This first feature by experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers is a follow-up to his 2006 short “This Is My Land,” about a Scotsman named Jake Williams who served as a sailor for two years to realize a lifelong ambition: to live an independent, isolated existence in a forest. Two Years at Sea is a stark, artistic, fly-on-the-wall documentary in which Rivers captures Williams' life and world, from morning ablutions to pulling down trees, building a stone wall, clearing out an old trailer, reading, sleeping, and resting on a bed of moss and grasses. There are hints of Williams' past life and personal history in glimpses of old photographs, a small stack of letters, a postcard, and the music he plays. But there is no real narrative here, and Rivers' film turns out to be less a portrait of a man who has chosen the path of Thoreau than a visual study of the textures, light, shadow, and other details of a place and way of life that most of us will never know. Rivers is more interested in composition—e.g., a wide shot of a straight horizon with wispy clouds edging in—than story, and after a while, the viewer accepts that nature is the main attraction here, making Williams, somewhat disappointingly, a remote subject. Still, thanks to arresting imagery—shot on 16mm cameras—this should be considered a strong optional purchase. (T. Keogh)