Blurring factual observation and playful fabrication, history and folklore, past and present, This Blessed Plot is an eccentric snapshot of small-town Englishness from British docu-fiction director and college lecturer Marc Isaacs. Shot in the pretty rural backwater town of Thaxted, around 40 miles north-east of London, it takes its title from a celebrated passage in Shakespeare’s Richard II hymning England as a kind of earthly paradise, a fanciful exercise in poetic patriotism which Isaacs neither affirms nor ironically subverts here. Like all his films, this unorthdox hybrid project is nuanced and character-driven, with an understated but ever-present awareness of the class, ethnic and political divisions that proved so destructive during Britain’s recent Brexit civil war.
This Blessed Plot is winkingly billed as a “documentary fiction film pageant”. It is also an unusually rough-edged production compared to Isaacs’ previous features, with its non-professional cast, stilted dialogue, clunky amateur dramatics and frequently raw camerawork. It is never entirely clear if this scrappy, mannered aesthetic is a deliberate choice or simply the result of the director’s emphatically lo-fi approach. In any case, it makes for an uneven viewing experience. But this is still a generally engaging passion project, rich in off-beat charm and imaginative touches. Screening at IDFA in Amsterdam this week, it will likely enjoy healthy festival traction but niche audiences thereafter.
For such a small town, Thaxted is surprisingly rich in cultural connections, with deep-rooted local traditions of folk music and morris dancing. Former residents include classical composer Gustav Holst, whose Planets Suite features heavily on the soundtrack to This Blessed Plot, and Christian socialist vicar Conrad Noel, whose fictionalised musings serves as a kind of ghostly audio narration for much of the film. Thaxted itself has been a movie location many times, notably for the short documentary Ripe Earth (1938) by future comedy maestros John and Ray Boulting, and for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales (1972). Both are referenced by Isaacs, with Noel himself appearing in repurposed archive footage.
Featuring an unschooled cast playing lightly disguised versions of their real selves, This Blessed Plot leans more overtly towards docu-fiction than most previous Isaacs films. He is again working with screenwriter Adam Ganz here, his collaborator on The Filmmaker’s House (2020), which brought a socially and ethnically diverse cast of characters into the director’s own suburban London home. A key protagonist in that film, burly builder and obsessive football fan Keith Martin, returns here to once more perform a thinly remixed version of his real self.
For this new chapter, the screen version of Keith is newly widowed (unlike his real self) and recently relocated to Thaxted. There he is haunted by the ghost of his wife Sue, as played by Susan Mallendine, who previously worked with Isaacs in It’s All White In Barking (2007). Keith cannot see Sue’s spectral visitations but his young Chinese lodger Lori (Yingge Lori Yang) communes with spirits in a matter-of-fact way. As a result, she uncovers a dramatic back story of infidelity and deceit that leads to violent confrontation between Keith and his roguish ex-con friend “Uncle” (Paul Bettie).
An aspiring documentary maker, both on and off screen, Yang is one of Isaacs’s real off-screen college students. Indeed, this whole film is loosely framed as her project, a curious outsider on a journey into the English hinterland. Some of her self-shot footage is even used in the final edit, which arguably helps excuse its lack of formal polish. But look beyond the self-imposed aesthetic limitations and clunky soap-opera twists that Isaacs and Ganz have imposed on their rich mix of material and This Blessed Plot emerges as a rough diamond, a muddled but enjoyably original essay-film curio which prods away at that fuzzy liminal region where England’s Dreaming hovers between mundane reality and comforting mythology.
Director, cinematography: Marc Isaacs
Screenwriter: Adam Ganz
Cast: Yingge Lori Yang, Keith Martin, Margaret Catterall, Susan Mallendine, Paul Bettie, Norman Cullis
Producters: Marc Isaacs, Lydia Kivinen
Editing: Marc Isaacs, David Charap
Sound: Sarah González Centeno
Producion company, world sales: Andana Films
Venue: IDFA (Signed)
In English
75 minutes
