Film review: Until Branches Bend's enigmatic Okanagan eco-allegory marks a stunning BC director's debut
Atmospheric story of a peach grader who finds an invasive insect grows into something slightly surreal and enigmatic
Grace Glowicki and Alexandra Roberts in Until Branches Bend.
VIFF Centre presents Until Branches Bend from March 24 to April 2. The March 24, 12:50 pm screening features a Q&A with director Sophie Jarvis, and the March 25 3 pm screening features a Q&A with Jarvis and producers Sara Blake and Tyler Hagan
PEACHES—FUZZY, pink Okanagan peaches—are everywhere in BC writer-director Sophie Jarvis’s assured debut feature Until Branches Bend. The opening closeups feature their journey from being picked off the tree to being washed in water to being sorted into containers. Later they take the form of a classic-Summerland-kitschy ice-cream stand, and also sit rotting and covered in flies in the grass. Those peaches in all their forms capture a fascinatingly offbeat mix of tones, from the absurd, to the serious, to the Biblical.
To Jarvis’s credit, this is a film unlike anything you’ve quite seen before. It begins as a kind of eco mystery amid a blisteringly hot Interior summer, when peach sorter Robin (Grace Glowicki) finds a fruit with a strange beetle in the middle of it. The company brass (including Lochlyn Munro as a golf-playing factory exec) doesn’t want to investigate, so Robin embarks on her own research. She becomes a half-hearted whistleblower who’s ostracized by a town that relies on the peach industry. Adding to the crisis is a backdrop of ongoing wildfires and toxic pesticides that have taken a toll on the valley’s local Indigenous population.
There are many more unexpected layers to Until Branches Bend—thanks in huge part to the understated and slightly oddball performances by Glowicki and Alexandra Roberts as Laney, the younger sister she takes care of. We learn that another infestation—moths—did in the women’s parents’ family farm. Jarvis interweaves themes of unwanted pregnancy, dreams of escape, and the peculiarities of picker culture.
One of its biggest strengths is the utterly unconventional female protagonist: gawky and intense, Robin has a way of shrinking into herself, slouching her shoulders, and scowling into the ground when she’s frustrated. She takes her work checking over fruit seriously, but she’s no self-righteous enviro activist: when someone asks her "Why are you doing this?", she doesn't know how to respond—probably because there are no easy answers. Her fraught bond with her free-hearted younger sibling always feels authentic.
Jarvis heightens all of this with a soundtrack punctuated with ethereal vocalizations and eerily twittering flutes. Her camera finds surreal details as the film becomes more existential and apocalyptic, and Robin seems to start to unravel: spooky caterpillar nets waving on the peach trees they cover; a person in a honeybee costume dancing out front of a shop; a pickup truck driving down the road with buzzing hives in the back.
The filmmaker turns the bucolic Okanagan landscape into an almost alien environment where society and corporations are trying to control the natural order of things—even when it comes to women’s bodies and reproduction.
It’s mesmerizing and enigmatic, part eco-allegory, part doomsday dream, and part study of the woman-nature bond. This is a quiet film that gets seriously under your skin in the most unexpected ways. Marking the emergence of an exciting and singular new voice on the province’s film scene, Until Branches Bend will make you see BC’s fruit belt in off-kilter, and occasionally scary, new ways.
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